NASA spacecraft detects enormous cosmic blast
APR 11, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025212
Science : On 28 March NASA’s Swift spacecraft captured the biggest cosmic blast since the Big Bang. The blast is unusual in that instead of fading, which would indicate that a massive star had blown up, the high-energy radiation—actually a series of bursts—has continued to shoot out like a jet. The source of the explosion is at the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away. “We think that there is a dormant black hole there that has accreted a lump of matter—probably a star that has fallen into it,” said astrophysicist Neil Gehrels, the lead scientist for Swift at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. If a star is “being torn up,” he said, astronomers expect it to fade in the next few days. If it does not fade, they may need to revise their theory.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
