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The brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded arrived on December 27, 2004 at Universal Time 21 hours, 30 minutes. The blast was 100 times more intense than any burst that had been previously recorded, equaling the brightness of the full Moon, but at gamma ray wavelengths. Gamma ray counts spiked to a maximum in 1.5 seconds and then declined over a 5 minute period with 7.57 second pulsations. It was determined to have originated from SGR 1806-20, a neutron star 20 kilometers in diameter which rotates once every 7.5 seconds, matching the GRB pulsation period. SGR 1806-20 is located about...

Astronomers say they have been stunned by the amount of energy released in a star explosion on the far side of our galaxy, 50,000 light-years away. The flash of radiation on 27 December was so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's atmosphere. The blast occurred on the surface of an exotic kind of star - a super-magnetic neutron star called SGR 1806-20. If the explosion had been within just 10 light-years, Earth could have suffered a mass extinction, it is said. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event Dr Rob Fender, Southampton University "We figure that...

Astronomers say they have been stunned by the amount of energy released in a star explosion on the far side of our galaxy, 50,000 light-years away. The flash of radiation on 27 December was so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's atmosphere. The blast occurred on the surface of an exotic kind of star - a super-magnetic neutron star called SGR 1806-20. If the explosion had been within just 10 light-years, Earth could have suffered a mass extinction, it is said. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event Dr Rob Fender, Southampton University "We figure that...

Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System and lasted over a tenth of a second. NASA and European satellites and many radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA headquarters. The scientists said the light came from a "giant flare" on the surface of an exotic neutron star, called...

For a fraction of a second in December, a dying remnant of an exploded star let out a burst of light that outshone the Milky Way's other half-trillion stars combined, astronomers announced today. Even on Earth, half a galaxy away, the starburst was one of the brightest objects ever observed in the sky, after the Sun and perhaps a few comets. The magnitude of the event caught most astronomers by surprise. "Whoppingly bright," said Dr. Brian Gaensler, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "It gave off more energy in 0.2 seconds than the Sun does...