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[Gaborn]

The enigmatic flash appears red and yellow in this view from Swift’s X-ray and ultraviolet/optical telescopes (Image: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler)

It was bright, fierce and thankfully short. A mysterious event in a distant galaxy has blasted our solar system with the most powerful burst of X-rays ever recorded, temporarily blinding an astronomical satellite.

At 0303 GMT on 21 June, a sudden burst of X-rays struck the Swift spacecraft, the mission team reported on Wednesday.

X-rays from space are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, so pose no danger on the ground. However, Swift orbits Earth at an altitude of 600 kilometres, where the blast was so intense that it overwhelmed the spacecraft's X-ray detector. It also confused the software that analyses the mission's data on the ground, says David Burrows of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, the mission's chief scientist.

"[The software] basically threw up its hands and said, 'Something must be wrong, because the data doesn't make sense,'" he says.

Puzzling pummelling

Swift's records show that at its peak, the burst pummelled the spacecraft with 143,000 X-ray photons per second. That made it nearly 15 times as bright as Scorpius X-1, a neutron star 9000 light years from Earth that is normally the brightest X-ray object in the sky. The burst dimmed rapidly during its first few seconds but continued glowing for about 10 minutes.

This powerful beginning was probably the most powerful X-ray flash ever recorded, Burrows says. An X-ray flash observed in 1979 may have appeared brighter – the comparison is hard to make because the 1979 flash was observed by a different spacecraft – but only because it occurred in a nearby galaxy, just 160,000 light years from Earth. By contrast, the June flash was traced to a vastly more distant galaxy 5 billion light-years away.

No one knows what caused the burst, but a clue lies in the fact that it accompanied a lengthy burst of gamma rays from deep space. Swift's purpose is to determine the origin of such bursts using three telescopes that detect gamma rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet and visible light. Long gamma-ray bursts are thought to be due to jets of matter shooting out almost at the speed of light from a star that is collapsing to form a black hole: the same type of event may have caused the recent X-ray burst.

However, shock waves from these violent events normally produce around 10 to 100 X-ray photons per second, so the Swift team is at a loss to explain why this X-ray burst was more than 1000 times brighter than this.

"We're very puzzled – we don't understand it yet," Burrows says. "Every once in a while something comes along that's completely unexpected and this is one of them."

Story Here

 

[Escape Goat]

I think i'm gaining super powers!!!

 

[UFRA]

Interesting.

 

[HeySeuss]

Aliens nuked a solar system to send us a message. Call Will Smith!

 

[Druz]

That's crazy. We can be blasted with a gamma-ray burst and be vaporized before even knowing what hit us.

 

[Veritas_]

That's Andross' secret weapon in Sector X! Send Starfox!

 

[revolverjgw]

I think i'm gaining super powers!!!

I think I just gained a super tumor

That's crazy. We can be blasted with a gamma-ray burst and be vaporized before even knowing what hit us.

Don't worry! Earth and probably the entire solar system will be long destroyed before that could ever happen. Keep your chin up.

 

[Druz]

I think I just gained a super tumor



Don't worry! Earth and probably the entire solar system will be long destroyed before that could ever happen. Keep your chin up.

I'm all about the positive! (Mankind will destroy each other and earth first)

Pip pip!

 

[teh_pwn]

Lots of crazy shit happens in space, we're just seeing now. Nearly all of it won't affect us.

That's crazy. We can be blasted with a gamma-ray burst and be vaporized before even knowing what hit us.

Yep, and it's a scary thought. But very unlikely. I'm betting you don't like flying do you?

 

[MisterAnderson]

X-Ray particle nuke from a thousand year galactic war methinks. What's cool to think about is assuming that the X-rays travel (almost) at the speed of light, that blast apparently occurred around 5 billion years ago.

Imagine how advanced a civilization that could make an explosion like that would be 5 billion years later, assuming they are still around and assuming they were the origin of it (which of course it was likely a natural occurrence/star/black hole related, but still)

 

[AAK]

And that explosion happened before any of our ancestors even existed.

 

[Gattsu25]

Space is pretty awesome.

I love the fact that some shit like this can happen and melt our atmosphere without so much as a second's warning.

 

[FnordChan]

"On the first day of the first month in some distant year, the whole sky froze golden. Some said it was the aftermath of the radium bomb, while others told of a final retribution, a terrible revenge, of the gods."

Fnord Leppard

 

[evil solrac v3.0]

must have been some super alien people fighting or something.