A Stellar Explosion You Could See on Earth!

[tech2000]

Astronomers are familiar with seeing amazing things through their telescopes. But nothing prepared them for an incredible explosion detected early Wednesday morning by NASA?€™s Swift satellite. At 2:12 a.m. EDT, Swift detected an explosion from deep space that was so powerful that its afterglow was briefly visible to the naked eye. Even more astonishing, the explosion itself took place halfway across the visible universe!

read more at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/brightest_grb.html

Pretty awesome..

Bye, Anders

[Chuft-Captain]

I do hope that wasn't a Betelgeuse type red-giant.

Anyone having second thoughts about this: http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11863 thread? )

[Hungry4info]

I do hope that wasn't a Betelgeuse type red-giant.

Yeah... me too =S

Anyone having second thoughts about this: http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11863 thread? )

Nope. In the story posted in this article (The GRB), a star appeared rather than disappeared.

[Chuft-Captain]

I do hope that wasn't a Betelgeuse type red-giant.

Yeah... me too =S

Anyone having second thoughts about this: http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11863 thread? )

Nope. In the story posted in this article (The GRB), a star appeared rather than disappeared.

Actually, if you look at the animation associated with the discovery, you'll see the explosion appears and then becomes too faint for the naked eye about 30 seconds later, so if anyone was actually lucky enough to be looking at that patch of sky at the exact right time, they'd be most likely IMO to just catch the tail end of the event, in which case it would look just like a star disappearing.

Anyway, here's another worrying development closer to home: http://www.noolmusic.com/videos/liechte ... r_bomb.php

This one probably belongs in purgatory. (Sorry Selden, couldn't resist. )

[Hungry4info]

Oohh.... I thought it would have been visible for several days or something.
Lol, I'm glad I didn't put forth the effort to go view it.
And LOL about the Lichtenstein nuclear bomb.

[eburacum45]

This is incredible- read this post from the Bautforum...
http://www.bautforum.com/1224591-post14.html

GRB 080319B certainly is the brightest explosion ever seen, not counting the galaxy nuclei (Bloom, et al., 2008; D'elia, et al., 2008; Dado, Dar & De Rujula, 2008). With a redshift 0.937, the GRB is over 7,000,000,000 light years distant, yet could be seen at Earth with an apparent visual magnitude about 5.7, which means it was of naked eye brightness for about 30 seconds, in the night sky over the United States. At a distance of 10 kpc (~32,600 light years) the burst would have had an apparent visual magnitude at its peak that is about 2 magnitudes brighter than the sun!