Posted on 01/12/2009 1:19:53 PM PST by Red Badger
The UWA Zadko Telescope, owned by the University of Western Australia, was the first one in the world to capture the massive Universe event that saw a giant star collapsing into a black hole and emitting a massive gamma ray burst , fortunately for us in a very distant galaxy. The emission is believed to be about 11 billion years old, and is visible only now because of the time the light needed in order to travel from the site of the collapse to our planet. Australian astronomers say that, if such an explosion were to happen in a place nearer to us, all life on Earth would undoubtedly go extinct.
"As if seeing one of the biggest explosions in the universe wasn't dramatic enough, we had a catastrophic computer crash on the night. We had nothing to record the images with, so team member Timo Vaalsta used a cheap video camera instead of the sophisticated astronomy camera that wasn't working," UWA Senior Research Fellow Dr David Coward, the leader of the Zadko Project, says.
"The image we recorded is a window in time, allowing us to peer into the distant past to a time when the universe was very exotic. We are discovering the richness of this transient universe, one that is filled with brief but extremely bright flashes," the scientist adds.
Surprisingly, the team were able to detect the burst some time before the European Southern Observatory got a hold of it, but was unsure of what they had captured, so they kept it to themselves, and only notified NASA in December. The American space agency then sent the data to all observers on the planet. Now, everyone in the community knows that the Zadko telescope was the first to detect the rarest of this kind of events the collapse of a bright star into a black hole.
According to the readings registered by several Earth-based observatories, the explosion that accompanied the collapse was about a billion times brighter than that of our Sun, which would explain why UWA researchers argued that, if the explosion were to happen in our galaxies, the effects would have been catastrophic for countless solar systems, including our own.
Now, as part of a new project, Zadko is directly connected to a global network of telescopes, coordinated by NASA's Swift satellite ground station, which means that it can be remotely orientated to points of interest in the skies.
Another key aspect of the project is to encourage high school participation in the research. It is likely that high school students could, as a result, contribute to tracking dangerous near-Earth asteroids. In partnership with the Western Australian Department of Education, the UWA Zadko Telescope Project is committed to enhancing science education," professor Alan Robson, Vice-Chancellor at UWA, concludes.
Helen Thompson may be the source of the emission. It’s common knowledge she is a very gassy person. In her youth some referred to her as “Toots” and they weren’t being sexist.
Oh. Thanks. Obviously I need more bourbon.
Thank you for the sarcasm. Manners... Sheesh.
Can anyone provide details on the measurement technique?
The age of the event was determined by associating it with an observable galaxy, whose distance is known from the redshift scale as originally calibrated by Hubble.
So the age is determined from the age scale of the universe itself, and does not represent an independent measure of that age.
And the red shift scale was calibrated using measurement of paralax no doubt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax
The furthest of these have a discernible red shift, and thus the red shift to distance scale can be established. Of course, this is the step that Hubble made.
*************************************EXCERPT******************************
Since the big stars live just a few tens of millions of years, the cloud of molecules that created them is still around them when they die.
The cloud was so dense around last June's burst that only 1 percent of the light from the burst was able to escape, NASA said.
The light of the gamma burst shining through the dust tells astronomers what that part of the universe was made out of back then, when the universe was just a youngster at 2.2 billion years old.
This was the first time astronomers were able to make an analysis of gas surrounding a gamma burst.
The Keck team quickly identified hydrogen and carbon monoxide, gases associated with star formation right here in the Milky Way galaxy.
But nearly half of the tell-tale absorption lines in the gamma burst light were unidentified, leaving lots of new discoveries waiting for the astronomers.
Helenthomasium......
Si...........
Gracias...........
>>>and the average lifespan of a star is something between 4 and 8 years (like our sun)...
Our sun is considered a small star, whereas gamma-ray-bursts are mostly result from the collapse of a much more massive star. Such a massive star has an accelerated life cycle when compared with a sun-mass star. A sun-like star’s life is measured in billions of years, but a massive star’s (the type that would emit GRBs) is measured in millions of years.
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes:
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
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WAY outside the visible spectrum. Sheese.
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