The University of California at Berkeley announced today that a deep space optical event which occured in March of this year was the single largest and brightest explosion ever recorded. The event, a Gamma Burst from an exploding star, was actually visible to the human eye in the night sky, and took place within the Bootes Constellation about 7.5 billion light years away.
We need to pause to remind ourselves what this means; the explosion happened 7.5 billion years ago and is only reaching the earth this year, making the distance from earth to the exploding star about 7.5 billion light years, or the distance that light can travel in a vacuum for 7.5 billion years.
Since light travels at approximately 186,282 miles per second, the star was (186,282 miles per second x 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365 days x 7.5 billion years) miles away, or 44,059,512,538,440,000,000,000 miles. In contrast, the sun is eight (8) light minutes away from earth, or the distance that light travels in eight (8) minutes, or (186,282 miles x 60 seconds x 8 minutes) 89,145,360 miles.
The explosion was so massive, that it was 200 million times brighter than the galaxy in which it resides, and if it was 6,000 light years from earth it would have appeared as bright as our own sun.
The first to pick up the explosion was NASA’s Swift Satellite, which announced it to the Berkeley group who have a direct link, and were able to pick up the event some 54 seconds after it made itself visible. A Polish group working in Chile was able to take photographs of the burst from their observatory.