"Steve Wright" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
WOW Sue thats one hell of a bang <g>, nearly as load as the one that was
recorded when the telephone bill came <lol>.
Mind blowing stuff, its hard to imagine how much energy that really
is................
Gotta run as I have had 3 assignments returned with "rewrite" written on
them in big letters <sob>.
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Sue Hartigan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 10:06 PM
Subject: L&I Steve-Biggest bang recorded
>Sue Hartigan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>
>WASHINGTON, May 6 (UPI) _ Astronomers report they have witnessed the
>largest explosion
>ever recorded in the universe, and may rival most other releases of
>energy since the big bang.
>
>In the space of a few seconds, the far-distant, mysterious explosion
>hurled out more than 100 times
>the energy the sun will emit during its entire 10-billion-year lifetime.
>
>Shri Kulkarni, the leader of one of several teams that have analyzed the
>discovery, says even space
>scientists used to thinking in universe- scale numbers find that energy
>``mind-boggling.''
>
>Kulkarni's California Institute of Technology team and another based at
>Columbia University
>present their findings in Thursday's issue of the British journal Nature
>and at a press briefing
>Wednesday at NASA headquarters in Washington.
>
>The explosion is called a gamma-ray burst, a phenomenon known since the
>1950s. Two features of
>this discovery in particular, however, are likely to force scientists to
>redefine previous theories about
>origin of these bursts:
>
>_First, its almost unimaginable energy. Gamma Ray Burst 971214, named
>after the date last
>December when it occurred, was hundreds of times more powerful than
>scientists predicted
>possible. In its lifetime, estimated at two to 10 seconds, the gamma ray
>burst emitted energy roughly
>equal to that generated in a similar short period by all 10 billion
>trillion stars in the entire universe.
>
>_Second, its distance. The burst occurred about 12 billion light- years
>away. A light year is the
>distance light travels in a vacuum in a year, or 5.88 trillion miles
>(9.46 trillion kilometers). Only last
>year did the Caltech team definitively prove that gamma-ray bursts come
>from outside the Milky
>Way galaxy, which is only about 100,000 light-years across.
>
>The two features _ energy and distance _ are actually related, says
>astronomer Charles Meegan of
>NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The Huntsville, Ala.-based expert
>points out that ``you'd
>have to hold a light bulb awfully close to your eye before it started
>looking as bright as the sun.''
>
>Meegan says of the discovery, ``Realizing now how powerful and distant
>these bursts are is like
>when people realized that the points of light in the night sky were
>really stars like our own sun.''
>
>Pinpointing these bursts is a recent accomplishment because gamma rays
>are so powerful they
>simply pass through a telescope's mirror like sunlight passes through
>window glass. The explosion
>itself is also over in a matter of seconds.
>
>GRB971214 was first captured by the Italian-Dutch satellite called
>BeppoSAX, which for the first
>time can at least narrow down the location of a gamma-ray burst to a
>region of space smaller than
>the size the moon.
>
>David Helfand of Columbia University received the alert from Rome at
>11:15 p.m. on a Sunday
>night last December.
>
>He told United Press International, ``It was probably the first time
>I've been in my office at that hour
>in 20 years. If I hadn't been there, we would have missed it.''
>
>He quickly called colleagues at the Kitt Peak Observatory in Tucson,
>Ariz., who happened to have
>a camera attached to the 2.4-meter telescope that night.
>
>Over the next two nights, infrared images revealed an object in the
>constellation Ursa Major that
>was quickly fading.
>
>As the burst's energy receded, Kulkarni's team at Mauna Kea, Hawaii,
>began to see a very faint,
>fuzzy body. The huge light-gathering ability of the 10-meter Keck II
>telescope had found ``not just a
>star-light object, but a host galaxy at the exact position,'' Kulkarni
>says.
>
>With the explosion's source in sight, the Caltech team could calculate
>its distance, and thus energy.
>
>NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory spacecraft, which detected
>GRB971214, has picked
>up about 2,000 gamma-ray bursts so far. The phenomenon was unknown until
>military satellites,
>launched to monitor nuclear testing in the 1950s, detected the bursts.
>They had not been observed
>before that, because the Earth's atmosphere blocks gamma rays.
>--
>Two rules in life:
>
>1. Don't tell people everything you know.
>2.
>
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