Posted on 03/21/2008 4:07:07 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye.
The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.
The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour. Telescopic measurements show that the burst — which occurred when the universe was about half its current age — was bright enough to be seen without a telescope.
"Someone would have had to run out and look at it with a naked eye, but didn't," said Gehrels, chief of NASA's astroparticles physics lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The starburst would have appeared as bright as some of the stars in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation, said Penn State University astronomer David Burrows. How it looked wasn't remarkable, but the distance traveled was.
The 7.5 billion light years away far eclipses the previous naked eye record of 2.5 million light years. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles.
"This is roughly halfway to the edge of the universe," Burrows said.
Before it exploded, the star was about 40 times bigger than our sun. The explosion vaporized any planet nearby, Gehrels said.
I would love to buy your supper someday and sit talking over these things! I have a feeling there are ‘coincident’ points of agreement we would find.
I have read a lot of stuff like what Ross puts out. For one thing Ross does not even know what life is. How it got started. What makes it tick.
What Ross doesn’t consider is that Life is a part of the very fabric of the Universe. That Life is a natural and normal occurance.
For someone to make assumptions as he does about something he doesn’t even comprehend is pretty silly don’t you think??
John
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/18/extrasolar.planets?gusrc=rss&feed=science
4.399272e+22 miles, or, in common parlance, ~40,000 billion billion miles away.
You have a nice day.
WOW ...my little brain can't comprehend that distance.
Yeah, it’s pretty much incomprehensible for any sized brain. Scientific notation cures this somewhat, at least it standardizes all measurements for the purposes of mathematics, but there’s no way any human could “relate” to such a distance.
You calculate using “e” and then talk about incomprehensible? I love Freerepublic. The poster family is so darn well educated and yet remain so humble. No, really, I love it!
My understanding of this type of event, admittedly not great, is that the burst is somewhat directional. Not a focused beam, but not equal in every direction either. Can you elucidate?
The problem with your assumptions is that as much as we profess to, we don’t KNOW what conditions life needs to exist. We have one single solitary data point. We now know that planets seem to be relatively common. But our current methods can’t do much more than give us a probability cloud of their orbit around their home star, let alone exact masses and surface conditions.
What we need to do is actually get more data. We need higher resolution telescopes, and unmanned missions to all stars within 10 light years. In order to do that we need a proof of concept of various advanced propulsion technologies, such as the Bussard Ramjet. Not to mention fusion rockets (without the ramjet) and various other high specific impulse methods.
I’m going to have to scan the chart in my copy of Space Propulsion Analysis and Design, but basically if you have a high enough specific impulse rocket, you can have the first data from Alpha Centauri within 15 years, accelerating at 0.1g for 5 years, before decelerating at 0.1g for the same amount of time. Using the same scheme, we can have data from Tau Ceti (11.8 light years distant) at 38 years from launch.
Between the distances of Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti, there are 17 known star systems. Quite a few of which are known to have planets. So we need 19 probes with the same capability and we have mission durations from 15 to 38 years. Probably up to 50 if you want a decent amount of data from each probe.
A few issues that need to be taken care of:
1) NASA needs to get over it’s fear of launching a mission in multiple parts.
2) The US public has to support this.
3) The US government has to agree with the people.
4) A few minor technical hurdles need to be cleared.
If we don’t find evidence of Earth-like planets within 11.8 light years, well I still wouldn’t be convinced that life is all that rare. Life doesn’t have to look, act, or exist like it does here on Earth. This is just one of at least two possible conditions of life.
Now we get in to the possibilities of silicon-based life forms...that gets interesting.
my brain is asking
“how do they know that this is ‘halfway’ across the universe”
Here is my question. If the universe is infinite, how can we say this happened half way across. Maybe he should have said the known universe. As another poster quoted Carl Sagen, I gotta say, I loved his anologies, rated right up there with Asimov, in perspective, we will all die one day and nothing that could possibly happen today or the next has any bearing on the rest of the universe.Somebody might just step on this little ant colony one day.
The universe is unbounded, finite, and spherical. The part we can see is size comparable to a grain of sand to the earth, which is how it appears flat.
If indeed it is finite, that means it has a starting point and an end, yet, you say it is unbounded.That is why I said the known universe. BTW, how small is small and how big is big???
Talking topology here. That is Poincare. Doesn’t have to make sense, it’s mathematics, which since Descartes describes and rules the world.
Our current leadership doesn’t make sense, we shouldn’t let them rule the world should we!LOL!!!
Put another way, how does it look like it is 17 billion light years to the edge in every direction from here? We must be at the center.
So our universe, like our galxy, is nothing more than a speck in the spectrum of the unknown.
The Masters of the World have us thinking that psychology is a science and that economics is actually something real. That’s an indication of their power compared to ordinary people. Want to go up against that? You won’t get two steps and you’ll be a distant memory.
There IS life on other planets!
Someone right here on FR posted info just last month about a meeting between President Reagan and US govt officials who held a crashed spaceship.
I know it is true because it was on the internet!
"In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."I never understood how Sagan got away so often with passing off negative theology as science.
"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
How does the vast, blind, indifferent, pitiless, impersonal universe that he described command "responsibility to deal more kindly with one another"? If we took him seriously, why wouldn't his "folly of human conceits", his posturings, his imagined self-importance, the delusion that he had some privileged position in the Universe, apply equally to his own meaningless, minuscule moralizing on humility and character-building?
Cordially,
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