Gamma ray burst: anyone feel toasty?

[Andy44]

Seems we all got buzzed last September:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.
The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.
"Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.
"If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said.
A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away....

Read the rest:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090219/sc_afp/sciencespaceastronomy

 

[RocketMan_Len]

It's too bad that there isn't an exact date that the burst was imaged in the article... I would have liked to have said that I got a Gamma-Ray burst for my birthday... :rofl:

 

[willy88]

Sorry, I couldn't stop myself from posting that. :rofl:

 

[RocketMan_Len]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwYzyRfNFn0Sorry, I couldn't stop myself from posting that. :rofl:

Just remember to take a few steps back, before you open the box...

 

[SiberianTiger]

Carina? It never gets above horizon where I live.

 

[Pilot7893]

Do you smell something burning? Oh wait, that's my molecular composition.