2008 March 28

3월 19일 목동자리쪽으로 75억 광년 떨어진  먼 우주로부터  가장 강력한 초신성보다도 250만배나 밝은 강력한 감마선 폭발이 있었다고 합니다.  사진은 하나처럼 보이지만 실제는 가운데를 경계로 두장의 사진으로 되어 있으며 왼쪽 사진은 엑스레이 사진이고 오른쪽은 자외선 사진입니다.  오른쪽 사진 중  중간 부분의 디스크 모양의 것이 왼쪽과 같은 대상입니다.


Explanation: How far can you see? Even the faintest stars visible to the eye are merely hundreds or thousands of light-years distant, all well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Of course, if you know where to look you can also spot the Andromeda Galaxy as a pale, fuzzy cloud, around 2.5 million light-years away. But staring toward the northern constellation Bootes on March 19th, even without binoculars or telescope you still could have witnessed a faint, brief, flash of light from a gamma-ray burst. The source of that burst has been discovered to lie over halfway across the Universe at a distance of about 7.5 billion light-years. Now holding the distinction of the most distant object that could be seen by the unaided eye and the intrinsically brightest object ever detected, the cosmic explosion is estimated to have been over 2.5 million times more luminous than the brightest known supernova. The monster burst was identified and located by the orbiting Swift satellite, enabling rapid distance measurements and follow-up observations by large ground-based telescopes. The fading afterglow of the gamma-ray burster, cataloged as GRB080319B, is shown in these two panels in X-rays (left) and ultraviolet light (right).