Ancient Nova Sets Modern Record

Long before our planet Earth had completed its formation from the swirling material around our local sun another star in our universe died in the fiery blast of a supernova. For seven and a half billion years the light from this explosion raced its way through the deeps of space. Half way across the visible universe the gamma ray energy finally reached our small blue planet. At 2:12 a.m. EDT on March 19, 2008 the Burst Alert Telescope on the Swift's Orbital Satellite detected a massive gamma ray emission coming from the direction of the constellation Bootes.

Quickly other observatories turned their mechanical eyes upon this noteworthy event. On the Swift satellite the Ultraviolet/Optical and X-ray telescopes were turned to gather data on their particular specialties and several ground-based telescopes also took up observations. Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas and the Very Large Telescope in Chile measured the redshift of the light from this explosion at 0.94 which confirmed the distance from the blast at the seven and a half billion light-year mark.

Christened GRB 080319B this supernova continued to amaze scientists. The object's luminosity, despite its great distance, was two and a half times greater than any other observed supernova. This marks it as possibly the brightest object humans have ever seen in our universe.

However, this event was not relegated to merely observation by scientists and their machines. As gamma radiation passes through interstellar dust, it heats up and produces a glow that can be seen in the visible light spectrum. For about thirty seconds as the wave front passed the glowing orange light of the gamma ray halo was so intense it could be seen by the unaided eye of an observer on the surface of our planet. Previously the record for most distant naked eye observation was held by the entirety of the M33 galaxy a mere 2.9 million light-years away.

Neil Gehrels, the lead scientist at NASA Goddard proclaimed, "Even by the standards of gamma-ray bursts, this burst was a whopper! It blows away every gamma ray burst we've seen so far."

It is not known exactly why this particular supernova was so much brighter and more intense than any previously sighted stellar explosion. There is speculation that the particular spin, mass or the magnetic field was the cause or if by chance the vertical jet of the explosion was pointed directly at our point in space. One thing scientist do know is that it was a long time coming and will likely be a long time before they ever chance to view another such spectacular event in the life of our universe.