Most Extreme Gamma-Ray Blast Yet Detected

Matt_dk sends in a quote from a story at NASA: "The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. ... Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time. ...Fermi team members calculated that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions."

Comments

Re:coloured dots!!!

[MichaelSmith]

What I wanted to see was a graph with time on the horizontal axis and energy on the vertical axis. That would give me a better feel of what the burst actually did.

Re:how do they know

[ergean]

This is why I come to /. once in a thousand comments there is one like this. Thank you!

Re:Big Bang

[geekboy642]

"quantized" red shift.
You don't even know enough to know you don't know what the hell you're talking about.