A Cosmic Salute to Arthur C. Clarke?

by Clifford Johnson     Department: Space

As Damon pointed out earlier, the great author and commentator Arthur C. Clarke died on Wednesday of last week.  Did you know that on that same day, there was a huge celestial event? Coincidence, or the universe's way of paying tribute? What was it? The most distant object visible to the naked eye here on earth appeared for a while in the sky - a "gamma ray burst" so hugely bright that its like has never been seen before. Gamma ray bursts are already somewhat mysterious, but  the luminosity of this one is more mysterious still. Was it an unusual burst, or was it a typical one that  just happened to be pointing its full beam of energy towards us when it went off? Numbers? The object is estimated to be 7.5 billion light years away from Earth, and as a space.com article says:

The most distant previous object that could be seen by the naked eye is the galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light-years from Earth.

The NASA/Swift image (click for larger view) shows the afterglow of the burst. The left is  in the X-ray spectrum while the right is a shot of the sky in the UV and visible spectrum. (Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler)

So the burst happened when the universe was much younger than it is now, and we're just seeing light from it recently. It's hugely far away. One way of imagining how bright this was is to imagine how bright it would have been if it were relatively nearby. Quoting from the article again:

I recommend a read of the whole article for more about the event. For more about the Swift space telescope project (and about the event), I recommend their website, from where I obtained the NASA/Swift image above.

-cvj

Tags: arthur c clarke, gamma ray burst, swift space telescope