Gamma Ray Burst Visible At Record Distance 68
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "A gamma ray burst detected on March 19 by NASA's Swift satellite has set a new record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. The burst had a measured redshift of 0.94, meaning the explosion took place 7.5 billion years ago. The optical afterglow from heated gas was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The previous most distant object visible to the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light years from Earth."
Re:To put that in perspective- (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To put that in perspective- (Score:4, Funny)
Photoshop (Score:3, Funny)
They're shooting at us (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Incredible Hulk Joke Thread (Score:3, Funny)
Record Distance (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To put that in perspective- (Score:5, Funny)
Fixed that for you.
Don't believe anything not in song (Score:5, Funny)
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, a Sun that is the source of all our power.
The Sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day, In an outer-spiral arm at forty-thousand miles an hour, of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred-billion stars, it's a hundred thousand lightyears side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen-thousand lightyears thick, but out by us it's just three-thousand lightyears wide.
We're thirty thousand lightyears from Galactic central point, we go round every two-hundred-million years.
And our Galaxy is only one of millions of billion in this amazing and expanding Universe The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whizz. As fast as it can go, the speed of light you know, twelve-million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure how amazing unlikely is your birth. And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cos there's buger all down here on Earth!