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Death Star
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Program Overview
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In 1967, a United States satellite network intended to monitor
Soviet compliance with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty detected unusual
signals coming from outer space. Defying astronomers' expectations,
these turned out to be unimaginably violent bursts of gamma-ray
radiation located at the far edges of the known universe. The
titanic explosions are so far back in time that they conceal clues
to the birth of the very first stars and black holes, back when the
cosmos had barely begun. "Death Star" is an intimate detective story
of the quest by leading astronomers to solve the riddle of the
gamma-ray bursts—the most energetic events ever detected and
brighter than a billion billion suns.
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