Posted on 09/12/2005 9:57:03 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers said on Monday they have detected a cosmic explosion at the very edge of the visible universe, a 13-billion-year-old blast that could help them learn more about the earliest stars.
The brilliant blast -- known as a gamma ray burst -- was probably caused by the death of a massive star soon after the Big Bang, but was glimpsed on September 4 by NASA's new Swift satellite and later by ground-based telescopes.
The explosion occurred soon after the first stars and galaxies formed, perhaps 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang explosion that scientists believe gave birth to the cosmos. The current scientific estimate for the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years.
"We are finally starting to see the remnants of some of the oldest objects in the universe," said Daniel Reichart of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reichart led the team that measured the distance of the blast from Earth.
This gamma ray burst, or GRB for short, could be the first of dozens or hundreds that might soon be unveiled to scientists, and these expected discoveries could help them learn more about the early universe, astronomer Donald Lamb said in a telephone news conference.
"This burst opens the door to the use of GRBs as unique and powerful probes of the early universe," said Lamb, a professor at the University of Chicago. "This is what we've all been waiting and hoping for and now the fun begins."
Scientists had theorized that such bursts could be detected, and the Swift spacecraft, launched last year, aimed to find them.
In cosmic terms, distance equals time, so this explosion occurred 13 billion light-years away, with its light just reaching earthly observers. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.
"We designed Swift to look for faint bursts coming from the edge of the universe," Neil Gehrels, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, said in a statement. "... For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there."
The earliest stars no longer exist, but debris from their destruction can still be detected with Swift and other telescopes; by studying the remnants of these ancient explosions, scientists may be able to tell what these stars were made of and how they formed.
While this gamma ray burst is the most distant explosion ever detected, scientists have found one object that is even further away from Earth -- a previously discovered quasar. Quasars are believed to be produced by gas falling into a massive black hole.
NASA --- The Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/swiftsc.html
---
MOST DISTANT EXPLOSION DETECTED, SMASHES PREVIOUS RECORD
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/news/2005/05-259.html
bttt
The thing I don't get is that... the image they show of the blast has stars in the background.
Any educated individual could conclude then that the light coming from the stars in the background was obviously older than the light coming from the blast featured in the article (the one I read at discovery news).
Perhaps that was an artists concept of the blast, but I saw no such commentary to that effect.
At your link the caption says: "Drawing of a Gamma-Ray Burst."
So, quite right, the stars shouldn't be there.
Evolutionists believe that if you have a deck of 52 cards and two jokers, and then shuffle the deck thoroughly, and throw the entire deck up in the air as high as you can, that eventually all of the cards will land, in perfect order, and perfectly aligned. The probability of this even happening one time in a billion years approaches zero. Then, to believe evolutionary "theory," you have to accept on blind faith that this same miracle of perfect order from total chaos has repeated itself millions of times to account for each of the plants, animals, and life on earth.
And you thought belief in god required faith.....
I believe this one was from the flash of a Kodak Instamatic camera taking a picture of earth from 1000 feet.
God has indeed done wonderful things. And evolution is the way he did them: the way in which he moulded & sculpted all the creatures of the earth - including our physical forms and basic mentation.
It is impossible to prove that the variation engine that runs evolution is actually, mindlessly random (as for instance the 19C materialists believed). A Christian can just as easily believe that God is running the unfolding of life on a 3.5 billion year timescale. It's all just a moment in time to Him.
But I do think that God gives hints as to the true state of affairs: the sweetness of bird song to human ears is (no doubt) explicable using the random theory of evolution, but I don't believe it. Creation is shot through with beauty, which is the hallmark of God - wheras beauty is hardly what we would expect from a truly mindless evolutionary process.
If this happened thirteen billion years ago, wouldn't the universe have been a heck of a lot smaller then? You would think the light would have reached a point where it had already been everywhere it could be before now. Is the universe expanding faster than the speed of light?
Be kind to someone with only six months of high school physics under their belt :)
ROFL. Evolution and the Big Bang don't have the slightest to do with each other.
And Big Bang theory has a lot more in common with Genesis than ANY other Cosmological theory, btw, so be happy with what you get.
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