This comes under the wowsers category. Halfway back to the big bang, a short gamma ray burst 100 times more powerful than most.
ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.
“This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder,” says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.
GRBs are among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. Most bursts fall in one of two categories: long bursts and short bursts, depending on whether they last longer or shorter than three seconds. Astronomers think that long GRBs are triggered by the collapse and explosion of massive stars. In contrast, a variety of mechanisms have been proposed for short bursts. The most popular model says that most short GRBs occur when two neutron stars smash into each other and collapse into a black hole, ejecting energy in two counterflowing beams.
The record-setting short burst is known as GRB 070714B, since it was the second GRB detected on July 14, 2007. Swift discovered the GRB in the constellation Taurus. The burst’s high energy and 3-second duration firmly place it in the short GRB category. Rapid follow-up observations with the 2-meter Liverpool Telescope and the 4-meter William Herschel Telescope found an optical afterglow in the same location as the burst, which allowed astronomers to identify the GRB’s host galaxy.
Your humble moderator is continually awed by the findings in astronomy that we’re making. From gravity to cosmology, relativity to the life of black holes, some of the most remarkable advances being made in science and technology are being made in astronomy, though this may change in the future with the growth of biology and chemistry.
I wanted to find something big and spectacular for my first posting to this blog and this story seems to fit both bills. It’s as big as anything I can think of that science has come up with so far and your humble moderator’s mind keeps trying to wrap itself around it, and of course, failing.
The New Scientist website reported on 24 August 2007 that there’s a void in space, 6 to 10 billion light years from Earth that stretches across a billion empty light years of absolute nothingness from the direction of the constellation Eridanus. According to Lawrence Rudnick and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, there are no radio waves coming from this area of space, meaning no galaxies, no super clusters, stars or even dark matter, though he seems to think that this is confirmation of dark energy in the universe.
But another team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that the incredible void may be the imprint of another universe on our own. Also reported in New Scientist, on 24 November 2007, Laura Mersini-Houghton and her team infer that this might also vindicate string theory.
According to the New Scientist article, “In string theory, 10500 universes (or string vacuums) are described, each with unique properties. They contend that the largeness of our universe is due to its vacuum counterbalancing gravity. This counter-gravity of the vacuum keeps our universe very large (rather than shrinking due to gravity)—larger than the other multitude of universes. The team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of this interaction they are seen by us.”
This is one reason to watch astronomy closely in the future and we’ll try to keep a close eye on it on this blog. A billion light years across. wowser.
What can your moderator say? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs.