luckily, we were watching:
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A trifecta of Nasa's most highly-powered telescopes -- Chandra, Swift and Hubble -- teamed up this month to explore one of the most puzzling cosmic explosions the space agency has ever observed.
It's an explosive burst of gamma radiation, which marks the collapse and destruction of a massive star. But while the flaring emission of these outlandish cosmic deaths never usually last for more than a few hours, this bast has been pulsating with high-energy radiation for more than a week.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... ft-team-upQuote:
The event was labeled GRB 110328A –a gamma-ray burst seen in 2011, third month (March) on the 28th day (in other words, last week). Normal gamma-ray bursts are when supermassive stars collapse (or ultra-dense neutron stars merge) to form a black hole. This releases a titanic amount of energy, which can be seen clear across the Universe.
And those last two characteristics are certainly true of GRB 110328A; it’s nearly four billion light years away*, and the ferocity of its final moments is not to be underestimated: it peaked at a solid one trillion times the Sun’s brightness!
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas ... lack-hole/Quote:
So what happened?
We think that at the center of every large galaxy (including our own Milky Way) lies a supermassive black hole, some with millions or even billions of times the Sun’s mass. Some of these, like our own, are sitting there quietly. Without matter falling into them, black holes are pretty calm. But if a gas cloud, say, wanders too close, it forms a disk around the hole called an accretion disk. This disk heats up and can emit tremendous amounts of light (as in this illustration here). Some galaxies are continuously feeding of material like this, and we call them active galaxies.
In the case of GRB 110328A, something else happened. The galaxy is known to be quiet; NASA’s Fermi satellite can see gamma rays over much of the sky, and has reported no emission from this galaxy for the past couple of years. So whatever happened here was a singular event.
What fits all the data is that of a star orbiting the center of the black hole. Perhaps it was on a safe orbit but got flung closer to the black hole after a close encounter with another star or gas cloud, or perhaps it started out close and over millions of years its orbit has brought it closer and closer to that monster at the galaxy’s heart.
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Today, NASA has released some new pictures of the event, including this Hubble Space Telescope shot:
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I know, it may not look like much at first. But remember what you’re seeing: the violent death of a star ripped apart by the gravity of a black hole… and it’s happening 3.8 billion light years away! That’s about 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers, so the fact that we can see it at all is pretty amazing. And terrifying.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badas ... e-picture/
CKA Super Elite 
CKA Uber 
