‘Unprecedented’ Cosmic Blast in Distant Galaxy Spawns Intergalactic Mystery
- Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:38pm by
Emily Esfahani Smith
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Astronomers are puzzling over an extraordinary cosmic blast in a distant galaxy. NASA has called the explosion “unprecedented.”
The gamma-ray explosion was observed on March 28 by NASA’s Swift satellite. Flaring from such an event usually lasts a couple of hours. (For a stunning visual simulation of another type of cosmic blast, check out The Blaze’s related coverage.)
Scientists say the March 28 blast is unusual because the effects are long-lasting. More than a week later, they continue to see high-energy radiation spiking and fading at the source.
Science Mag has more details:
Astronomers have observed possibly the biggest blast ever seen in the cosmos. When NASA’s SWIFT space observatory first spotted it 10 days ago, observers thought it was a massive star blowing up as a supernova and expected it to fade within hours or even minutes. But the high-energy radiation from the source has shown no sign of dying down, which suggests that astronomers may have caught a star in the process of being ripped to shreds by a black hole.
The blast is actually a series of bursts, like a string of firecrackers going off one after another. “We know of objects in our own galaxy that can produce repeated bursts, but they are thousands to millions of times less powerful than the bursts we are seeing,” says Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “This is truly extraordinary.”
SWIFT’s Burst Alert Telescope detected the source of the bursts on 28 March. The Hubble Space Telescope took an image of the source on 4 April, which located the explosions at the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away. On the same day, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory took a picture of the source by pointing at it for 4 hours. That image also showed that the source of the bursts was at the center of the galaxy imaged by Hubble.
Popular Science has a theory:
So astronomers now have a theory. It’s quite possible that a star was minding its own business when it wandered too close to the galaxy’s central black hole. The intense forces generated by the black hole began to tear the star apart, causing infalling gas to begin streaming into it in a particle jet. This spawned an outflowing jet along the black hole’s rotational axis, and that jet is pointed directly at us from billions of light years away.
Since the explosion, the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have focused on the aftermath. Hubble will observe if the galaxy’s core changes brightness in the coming days.
The galaxy is 3.8 billion light years from Earth. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Comments (179)
rightplanet
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:57pmNo, that was a planet that turned completely to liberalism.
Report Post »parlayer
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:41pmThat Has to be the cause of that event!!
Report Post »Polish_Sensation
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:56pmI feel smaller then Anthony Wieners “Wiener”. LOL
Report Post »Jabber
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:39pmUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuug. Now I have to wash my eyes! If I have nightmares tonight….I’m blaming you.
Report Post »RebelSon
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 10:36amI’m betting there IS nothing smaller.
Report Post »Clean Patriot
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:55pmmaybe they had an earthquake and a tsunami up there.
Report Post »Polish_Sensation
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:59pmUsing HAARP
Report Post »RickyPatriotson
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:50pmA wise man told me…
Death is the way of all things. The only way to conquer death is not to live, and that is unacceptable. Birth is but the precursor of inevitable death, and only knowledge lies between. R.L.M.
Ricky
Report Post »Jabber
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:38pmKnowledge, cheeseburgers, and chocolate pie. Those lie in between too. Don’t forget those.
Report Post »markamerica
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:39pm@Ricky:
It’s odd. The theories about our universe are quite bizarre-sounding(and I think some just plain bizarre.)
Here’s another oddity: Without the deaths of massive stars, the existence of the earth wouldn’t be possible. Basically, near as scientists can figure, anything heavier than hydrogen and perhaps helium on the periodic table had to have been made via fusion in a stellar core. All life on Earth is carbon-based. Carbon is created in stars. Ditto every heavier element. The heaviest element a star produces via fusion is iron. When that begins to happen, the star’s life is at an end. It dies and if it’s a very big star, more than 1.4 times the mass of our sun, it may be a violent death(supernova.) It is in supernovae that the even heavier elements are surmised to be created. So ironically, without the deaths of large stars in violent fashion, human life, indeed all life we know, would be impossible. The supernovae eject vast clouds of matter, including these heavier elements, and they are subsumed in the creation of solar systems and so on.
At present, there are three basic forms of the end of the universe widely seen as the most likely scenarios. These include the big freeze, the big crunch, and the big bounce.
The first proposes a universe that continues to expand for a google years (and beyond), going dark and cold as fusible matter runs out and the universe expands to an extent that gravity is unable to re-combine it. The second proposes that all the matter in the universe eventually reverses course, and begins to recombine due to gravity, ultimately resulting in a re-formed singularity and perhaps another big bang(an oscillating universe.) The big bounce is a play on the second, except that it is surmised that it never fully re-condenses, but at some point just short of that, the forces involved basically cause it to re-expand in a new big bang, and that again, we have a sort of oscillating universe.
From a philosophical point of view, one might say that the first, the big freeze, is the most fatalistic-sounding. The other two leave open the possibility of an endless cycle of birth and death.
At present, most physicists seem to think it’s the big freeze. More recently, advocates of a theory called Loop Quantum Cosmology which involves a theory of gravity called Loop Quantum Gravity has put forth the idea of the Big Bounce. To be honest, among them, I think theirs may be the closest to the real picture, but then again, I’m an optimist. Of course, there are many wild theories about what is ‘outside our universe’ if there is such a place, and M theory and its eleven dimensions, the three spatial ones, plus time, and 7 extra dimensions(which I personally find obnoxious mathematical doodling.)
Remember when you were in school and solved your quadratic equations for X and Y? Remember how you always came up with two solution sets? Remember how when applied to a word problem, this would lead to a solution set that might have a negative, but since the problem was a measurement, say miles or feet, or something else, that since you couldn’t have a negative answer, you could exclude the solution set with a negative solution for one or both variables? Yeah, so M Theory is a bit like that, except that they have 8 solution sets, and these extra dimensions are defined by the 7 remaining sets that are what you would have called in algebra the implausible or impossible solution set[s] given a word problem.
Of course, there are other issues that have muddied the water(or the aether.) For instance, what is dark energy? Dark matter? Dark flow? All three of these are proposed to explain phenomena for which there is no ready explanation within the standard model. Like, why is the rate of expansion of the universe accelerating, rather than decelerating? All the explosions we deal with on earth tell us gravity acts as a drag to slow them down over time. Yet observations now find the universe is actually accelerating. That is in conflict with what we thought we knew about gravity, such that either: There is another unknown(dark) force at work, or we have largely mis-judged the functioning of gravity. Then there is the question of why galaxies hold together. They are spinning too fast, by all appearances, and there doesn’t seem to be enough gravity to hold them together based on the matter we can see. So, they invented ‘dark matter.‘ Here’s the problem: To fit the standard model, they have had to predict there is roughly 3 times more ‘dark matter’ than ordinary matter in the universe, and that ‘dark energy’ must account for 6 times as much gravity, such that ordinary matter that we can account for when we look out into space accounts for something like 10% of all gravity….which leads me personally to think we have gravity wrong after all.
Newton said it didn’t matter whether gravity was an attractive or repulsive force, but only that his formulae could describe its operation. Einstein came along and said that gravity was a function of mass in relation to 4 dimensional spacetime. Now comes along people like me who posit another theory yet, that’s been proposed in somewhat different form before: That gravity is a function of ‘empty space’ that isn’t so empty after all, and that rather than being an attractive force, gravity is a repulsive force or a force of displacement.
In any case, at the grandest scales, it’s all theory. Informed theory. Well-developed theory. Theories that have taken all of man’s history to develop and mathematically define. We’re not nearly finished, assuming humanity survives long enough to figure it all out.
Mark
Report Post »Ghandi was a Republican
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 1:33amWhat?
Report Post »TheGreyPiper
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:38pmI’ll drink to that!
Report Post »markamerica
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:41pmIt’s true: They can’t exactly explain it. They have theories to cover it, and they’re fairly certain about a few things. They believe(and have pretty solid evidence) that most galaxies above a certain mass (smaller are considered clusters, mostly) have a central black hole that seems to have played some part, via gravitation, in the formation of galaxies. Our own Milky Way has such a black hole, near as we can determine, around 3-4 million times the mass of our sun.
It’s also believed that black holes periodically go on feeding rampages, as what happens is when they consume everything around them, they also tend to generate a shock wave off the disk of matter falling into/onto them. This tends to push back a good deal of matter, creating a bit of a time horizon between vast ‘meals.’ When the black hole finishes consuming everything in the disk, there’s no more matter(or not much) falling in, and thus the shock wave pushing matter away dissipates, and this allows it to begin attracting that matter. Once it gets a good feed going again, it again produces a shockwave and the process repeats.
When this is all going on, they’re termed Quasars (Quasi-Stellar objects) and they emit vast polar jets that focus all of the energy from matter that gets propelled away, all the lucky particles that ride the focused ends of the shockwave away, out into space. They have observed these jets extending many hundreds of thousands of lightyears out.
What they think they’re seeing now is one of those polar jets, but because we happen to be looking directly ‘down the barrel’ of this particular particle gun, it looks like an ongoing explosion. Think of being over the top of a geyser and looking straight down on it. The difference here is that there are two… One facing us, and one facing away, along the rotational axis of the black hole.
A similar thing happens when some ver massive stars expend their fuel, and go supernova… They call them gamma-ray burst[er]s. The difference is that those are relatively short-lived, usually measured in seconds. They also believe they announce the birth, in many cases, of stellar-mass back holes. (Think of those as babies compared to the monsters at the center of galaxies.)
Yes, billions of lightyears distant. So far, I think the furthest object we’ve seen is a galaxy some 13.7 billion light-years away, which comports well with their theory that the universe is roughly 14.3 billion years old. It also means the observable universe is roughly 28 billion miles in diameter. Of course, it may be that the universe is a good deal larger than that, but that’s what they can see, and their best estimates suggest, based on current standard model calculations.
Now, what Isle said is true: At the edges, science begins to look a lot like philosophy.
IM
Report Post »RickyPatriotson
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:55pmThank you well written. Not sure if its correct but it sure (sounds/reads) (good/well)
Report Post »Jabber
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:36pmSo….a black hole that (thinks it) is the center of the galaxy, is consuming everything around it, generating a shock wave, and destroying everything around it until nothing “matters” anymore-and all the light gets shafted?
This sounds sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo familiar……..reminds me of something………hummmmmmm.
Report Post »termiteteacher
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:17amThank you. That‘s one of the best explanations I’ve read. If you are not exactly right, you certainly, in my view, close to the detailed truth.
Report Post »markamerica
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 1:59am@TermiteTeacher:
Here’s an interesting image of an active galaxy with its quasar out-putting plumes of charged particles and gases:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/cena/
You’ll notice that the jets are roughly perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. (Or along its rotational axis.) It seems that most(if not all) spiral galaxies rotate around the same axis as their respective supermassive black holes, much as the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun in a plane roughly perpendicular to the solar axis. This seems to hold true throughout all gravitationally bound systems. So the axis of the dominant body tends to be the axis around which all things in a given system move.
Anyway, this is an excellent picture of an active galaxy spewing its jets out into the universe. If you can imagine being in a position to ‘look down the barrel’ of one of those jets, it would look very much like an explosion that went on and on, much as the picture that spawned this posting.
Hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with tens or hundreds of billions, or even trillions of stars, with supermassive black holes at their centers that seem to be roughly 0.5% the mass of their respective galaxies.
One of the things science loves is a pattern. Patterns lead to understanding. Discerning patterns is sometimes the difficult part.
Mark
Report Post »Nick Pable with Buckshot
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 5:45amMark, haven’t seen you on here before, but thanks – you explained that really well. Stick around, I’ll look out for your posts.
Report Post »WireWizard
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:31pmSomebody cal Al, we’ve found the source of Global Warming!
Report Post »Rayblue
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:14pmUniverse Warming.
Report Post »can we be taxed for it ?
ThomasUSA
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:12pmIt’s a cosmic Bur-tation!
Report Post »Jabber
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:27pmOH CRAP! Now I have to wipe off my screen AGAIN! Hilarious!
Report Post »big oil iceman
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:12pmI think Cass Sunstein will probably try to regulate it somehow.
Report Post »NancyBee
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:33pmHe is a dangerous man!
Report Post »gill
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:09pmits Bush’s fault, he was shooting bottle rockets at the moon!
Report Post »teddrunk
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:23pmOutstanding…LOL
Report Post »UrsaMajor
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 2:41amThe “W” stands for “Wormwood”.
Report Post »AZPSYGUY
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:08pmWhat if it’s Death Star??? “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
Report Post »1952
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:06pmIt’s interesting, BUT, why did the Blaze post it? It almost seems like they are baiting certain groups at times?
Report Post »AZPSYGUY
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:09pmHave you ever read the Huffington Post?
Report Post »1952
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:13pmActually, no.
Report Post »1952
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:34pmOh… I see what you mean.
Report Post »donh2
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:05pmAnother explaination for the Japan earthquake . Invisible energy pulsations rippling though space from this ancient blast….May also explain the growing insanity and worldwide violance of Man as our brains are influenced by these invisible cosmic disturbances.
Report Post »Jabber
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:26pmThat’s why them thar tin foil hats come in handy my friend. :-)
Report Post »RightInSoManyWays
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:04pmGlobal warming, no doubt! When will we learn that our addiction to fossil fuels is killing not only our planet, but the entire universe?
Report Post »AzSage
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:02pmGlobal warming caused it. Or is it Geroge Bush’s fault?
Report Post »AZPSYGUY
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:29pmNo, it’s because the tea partiers are racist. Duh!
Report Post »ronmorgen
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:01pmMinding your own buisness and BAM! Sucked into a black hole.
Report Post »chickenlittle
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:10pmI don’t know man… that’s pretty far away, too. Has Pelosi phoned home lately?
Report Post »chips1
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:57pmI wonder if Sharpton of Jackson have a theory about black holes. Are they going to say scientists are racist?
Report Post »chickenlittle
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:00pmI’d like to think it was just the progressives self destructing… far flung district and all that.
Report Post »psycodad36
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:58pm3.8 billion lght years,well i wonder if this will raise the price of gas?
Report Post »3.8 BILLION light years?this stuff happened a LOOOOOOOONG time ago.
time to let it go,come to grips with reality and just thank GOD for our time here.
Physicist_In_Training
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:07pmIt’s true that if we are only seeing this now, then it happened 3.8 billion years ago. But visible light travels at the same speed as gamma rays do; they’re both just different frequencies of light. So, just as the visible light is only now reaching Earth, so also are the high energy gamma rays only just now reaching Earth. Just because the event happened a long time ago doesn‘t mean that it won’t affect us now.
Report Post »Sinista MACE
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:55pmIf that’s a jet pointed directly at us, expect to be bathed in gamma rays.
Report Post »UlyssesP
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:31pmNo one get me angry.
Report Post »UrsaMajor
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 2:40amThe atheists here are already hulking up just because someone wrote the word “God.” We don’t need anymore gamma ray shenannigans!
Report Post »starman70
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:06amIt’s another unexplainable missle launch like the one in California.
Report Post »VanGrungy
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:51pmThis is one reason I don’t take Genesis literally… but at least the order is correct..
Report Post »Islesfordian
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:06pmLet me get this straight: An event scientist can‘t yet explain is a reason you don’t take Genesis literally.
What possible correlation is there between the two?
Report Post »VanGrungy
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:05pmPlease tell me how long God’s day is…
it’s a trick question… if you don’t get it, don’t bother me..
Report Post »Marylou7
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:07pmIt’s probably God reminding us there is an eternal hell.. only kidding…but who knows?? God did create the universe AND me, yeah!!
Report Post »VanGrungy
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:12pmhere’s another..
Please show me where in the Bible (hey, I love that book) God explains: Solar flares, magnetic poles, cloud formation.. etc..
If you want to be like a muslim (slavish literalist), you go right ahead… I realize that Mathematics are God’s language..
btw… as the quran stories have established, the Bible wasn’t “dictated” to scribes.. Our perception today would produce a much different Bible based on the Lord’s Spirit… Genesis would be quite a different understanding if it was written today after learning so much about our physical world..
God can be known… Science is a way to do it…
Report Post »mauijonny
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 1:15amHey, VAN. Mostly agree with you except for the very last part: “God can be known” (via math). While we’re in this form, real science just gives us more avenues to understand and appreciate how spectacular and miraculous this Pale Blue Dot is – even now, with all our tech and knowledge, it’s just a glimpse. It won‘t be until we rejoin the Creation that we might get a chance to ’know’ God – remember, energy (what fuels our corporeal lives) can be neither created nor destroyed, just transformed…God, though, is eternal (even physicists are finding it harder to explain the Big Bang as they‘re finally realizing that ’something‘ can’t be made from ‘nothing’. So, no my friend, we won’t know God in this form, but God‘s made it so that we’ll want to…
Report Post »VanGrungy
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 5:12am“So, no my friend, we won’t know God in this form, but God‘s made it so that we’ll want to…”
The answer to the question, How long is God’s day?….
God isn’t constrained by time.. or space… or imagination..
I agree with you.. We as limited beings cannot truly ‘know’ God… That doesn’t mean we should not try.. Thanks for your reply…
Report Post »Islesfordian
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:00amVanguny,
I take it your meaning is that since the Genesis account doesn‘t explain many things in the observable universe you don’t take it literally. I see this as a non-sequitur. It would only follow if the Bible claimed to explain every individual thing in the universe. This is something it certainly doesn’t do, even if some foolish believers thinks it does. The Bible is primarily about God, and it doesn’t tell us all there is to jnow about God. It can’t, because God is infinite. We will have eterinity to learn about God. the Bible just tells us what we need to know for where we are now on that journey. The universe, though not infinite, is still much bigger than any scientific thought can fully comprehend in the limited time that man has been aware. So new astronomical events have as much bearing upon how to read the Genesis account as the invention of airplanes.
The real reason one would claim that Genesis not be taken literally should be keyed to what the bible does say and how that squares with scientific observation.
Here it should be noted that the term “literal” can have a narrow or broad meaning. In one sense the statements “the sun rises in the east” and “the plantes float in space” both cannot be taken in an absolute literal sense. But so much human language involves metaphoric expressions that we not call “literal”.
As to God and time, you are correct that God, the creator of time and space, cannot be measured by it. God is “outside” time. God cannot be know as he is through his creations, as these only reflect aspects of God.
But your idea that science, through math, can know God makes the assumption that the mind can escape the bounds of the created universe and perceive the rules behind it. Yet the human mind is a part of the universe. It is, in theological terms, a created thing. God created even math. Between us and God lies the singularity, or the act of creation, something inexpliacble by the creation/universe that followed it.
Science will never reveal God. God must reveal himself. The question is, what is the likeliest form his self-revelation would take to creatures such as us? Math may be the supreme language of the physical sciences, but it certainly isn’t the dominant language or form of thought for the vast majority of human beings.
Report Post »VanGrungy
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:46pmI agree with you.. We as limited beings cannot truly ‘know’ God… That doesn’t mean we should not try.. Thanks for your reply…
I really mean it.. I am happy to know we are on the same side…
stay cool bro..
Report Post »VanGrungy
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:55pm” it certainly isn’t the dominant language or form of thought for the vast majority of human beings.”
I know what the unifying ‘theory’ is… I could never possibly explain it though.. C’est la vie..
Report Post »Islesfordian
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 2:52pm“We as limited beings cannot truly ‘know’ God”
Yes, not if by ‘knowing’ you mean a total comprehension. Even the angels cannot hope to comprehend God. But God can make himself known and make it possible for us to ‘know’ him as well as we know anyone or anything. So we should never stop trying to master the knowledge he has made available to us.
For me the Incarnation is the “unifying theory” :-)
Have a Nicene Day.
Report Post »hightide
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:50pmSigns and wonders in the Heavens….
Report Post »BIGJAYINPA
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:43pmPlagues, Pestilance, Wars and Rumors of Wars…It is getting just a little scary, isn’t it???
Report Post »danmsnyder
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:49pmThe deeper you look into space the more questions than answers there are.
Report Post »MODEL82A1
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:07pmIf you think you’re entitled to real answers on such matters, good luck to you.
Report Post »TennesseeConservative
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:10pmThey have no clue. But they always talk like they do. Oh yes it is 480 Billion years old like they where there. So called science today is a bunch of idiots, science is latin for knowledge, they have no knowledge, idiots. STOP lying and say the truth, we do not know.
Report Post »MODEL82A1
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:42pmTENN, You do understand that there are some actually provable, quantifiable forces at work here, don’t you? Do you actually question humans’ ability to measure the speed of light?
Report Post »Physicist_In_Training
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:59pmTennessee, you are right that there’s a certain amount of uncertainty when determining interstellar distances. But 3.8 billion LY is no sweat. The first technique is parallax (the fact that when you move relative to objects, objects closer to you appear to move more than objects far away, like how street signs whizz by you but mountains crawl). Parallax is exact, but it doesn’t work for very large distances. After parallax fails, we use “standard candles,” which are identifiable objects that we know how to measure the true luminosity of, such as Cepheid variables or type 1a supernovae. These objects have very unique characteristics that allow us to identify them, and also allow us to know how bright they ACUTALLY are. Since we know how intensity of light dissipates with distance, it’s really pretty easy, once these objects are identified, to determine their distance from Earth. Once we get those things measured, we can determine about how far away other objects are in their relative vicinity.
Report Post »Showtime
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:46pmI’m amazed that anyone caught it, but I guess there are people who cannot tear themselves away from a telescope. Cameras that can record galaxies in space are fantastic! And mindboggling!
Report Post »Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:48pmTrue, it makes us realize just how small our little home is compared to the unlimited forces and wonders of the heavens above.
Report Post »chips1
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:49pmAnd we can’t even find a birth certificate.
Report Post »Robert-CA
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 2:00amit’s MAN MADE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Report Post »HappyStretchedThin
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:45pmSome dumb EPA agent is going to have a field day testing for cosmic radiation because of this…
Report Post »Showtime
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:48pmWonder how many billions of dollars this is going to cost?!
Report Post »HappyStretchedThin
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:55pmThink they’ll test milk first, or grass?
Report Post »BetterDays
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:01pmUmmmm, wonder how something could occur far out in space and Obama not know about it before hand. Probably why Obama is heading out of town, the “rays” from this phenomenon will illuminate DC at 9am. Saturday.
Report Post »ZaphodsPlanet
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 3:03amYes, we’ll spend billions with a blue ribbon commission of some kind appointed by BO, since he loves the color blue, only to find out that someone forgot to shut the high beams off on their space ship.
Report Post »poverty.sucks
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:43pmWhat‘s most puzzling is that we can’t explain it!
Report Post »Islesfordian
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:52pmSoon they’ll be able to explain it, which only means deciding what unverifiable hypothesis they can agree on. At the edges science becomes little different from philosophy.
Report Post »lovenfl3
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:52pmI agree, wonder what it really was. Just proves that there is so much we will probably never really understand about the universe. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11eYGdOVnvc
Report Post »MODEL82A1
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:53pmThe Christians here surely can. It’s the same answer for everything, “God” (i.e. “Magic”). The rest of us are stuck will the limitations of human knowledge. (i.e. We don’t know, we don‘t have the capacity to know and that’s ok.)
rt elms
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:53pmEven so, its ancient history. 3.8 billion years ago if you can believe what you read.
Report Post »HappyStretchedThin
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:54pmIsles thereby proves he is both a scientist and a philosopher…;-)
Report Post »GBMBulletsSKNRD
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:55pmThose are some mind boggeling numbers.
Report Post »GBMBulletsSKNRD
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:12pmRT ELMS, That is 3.8 billion LIGHT years.
Report Post »anutter
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:12pmHopefully Betelgeuse will blow in my lifetime, that would be something to see! Err wait…if it blew in my lifetime than it would take 600 years to see it…
Report Post »pappy
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:17pmI looked at it thru my telescope. I think it a ship coming to pick up the obama family…
Report Post »CincinnatiJim
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:17pmit must be global warming
Report Post »GreatAmericanBeckFan
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:30pmGBMBULLETSSKNRD,
A light year is how far light travels in a year so it is 3.8 billion years ago, hopefully its not something that happened that took that long for it to effect our planet.
Report Post »Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:38pmMust have been the mothership Michael Moore and Pelosi came from; when they received orders from homeworld to retrieve them from earth, they ran their ship into the black hole to avoid having to deal with them again.
Report Post »watchtheotherhand
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:53pmI absolutely LOVE astronomy it is probably the most interesting area of study of creation to me. The vastness and beauty is mind boggling. What an AWESOME God !!!!
Report Post »Anti_Spock
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:55pm“The galaxy is 3.8 billion light years from Earth. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.”
Total distance in miles: About 22.8 septillion miles. Amazing distance.
Report Post »decendentof56
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:55pmI can’t even comprehend how far 3.8 B light years is. Lets see….186,000 mi/sec x 60 min/hr x 24 hr/day x 365 days/yr x, oh never mind. What were we talking about? Baseball?
Report Post »right-wing-waco
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:13pmLets put Obama into a space capsule and have him go take close up pictures and bring them back.
Report Post »banjarmon
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:36pmCan this Cosmic Blast in Distant Galaxy be taxed??
Report Post »Physicist_In_Training
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:49pmAwesome!!
Report Post »Robert W
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:50pmSilly humans, God’s in control.
Report Post »GreatAmericanBeckFan
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 10:51pmThat sure is an incredibly huge light to be what basically amounts to a distance of infinity from us.
Report Post »Jaycen
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:09pm@Other Posters
Raw, brutal arrogance….
Does a belief in God mean stupid, blundering, fanatical need to attribute “the direct hand of God” in every event that isn’t immediately explainable to you?
Is it possible…just a little bit…that a person can believe in God, and that God is what kicks these things into motion, and yet they ALSO have a logical and scientific explanation? I have no problem with the concept that things evolve, and that humans have been evolving. I’m not God, so I can’t be sure…but from my limited perspective, creating beings that constantly change and strive to improve themselves is infinitely more interesting than creating beings that are completely static and unchanging.
Just try to open you mind enough to chew on that for a minute or so. Just try to open your mind.
Report Post »jzs
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:11pmIslesfordian, surely that is the most intelligent comment I have ever read on this website. Seems to me, even with your very short comment, you must be knowledgeable not only about astronomy and cosmology, but epistemology as well, if I’m using that word correctly.
In any case my philosophical comment is that if we could all see Earth as it is, an incredibly tiny outpost of humanity, in a very small corner of the universe, we’d work harder to get along. The 3.8 billion light years it took for light to reach us from this event is 3.8 thousand thousand thousand human lifetimes. If we could all understand the vastness of the universe, and then see our own small insignificant plot of habitable land from orbit, we all might think our differences are smaller than we make them.
Too philosophical? Sorry!
Report Post »joe1234
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:15pmmodel: and the atheist answer is always darwin did it.
Report Post »Dale
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:55pm@pappy;
I believe you mean minister Louis Farrakhan, and I believe it’s late!
Report Post »mauijonny
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:36am@ JAYCEN: Ditto. And whether you believe in Bible Creation or Evolution, it’s still a miracle (learned that one from Stephen Jay Gould – a brilliant evolutionary scientist for the Natural History Museum, etc… and devout Jew).
Report Post »thepatriotdave
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 1:28ampoverty.sucks
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 8:43pm
What‘s most puzzling is that we can’t explain it!
—————————————————-
There is much that God does that we can’t explain. I just accept it at face value and leave the rest up to him. His designs have been pretty good so far.
Freedom Jamboree – Press Release – This is gonna be HUGE!
Report Post »http://www.AmericasTeaPartyNews.com
Anti_Spock
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 2:09amJZS.. “The 3.8 billion light years it took for light to reach us from this event is 3.8 thousand thousand thousand human lifetimes.”
Truly remarkable. Think what it is today. Perhaps another galaxy with another earth in the Jurassic period.
Report Post »TheBees
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 3:15amIt’s all George W. Bush’s fault!
Report Post »Mannax
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 4:26amI am of the belief that the creator (call him/her/it God or what ever else you wish to) has done many things that I believe that we are meant to figure out in time.
Report Post »HonorNTruth
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 7:28amIt‘s part of Obummer’s green energy program.
Report Post »bread and circuses
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:08amI am willing to teach you, but I will neither spoon-feed you or preach to you.
It was a white hole
Now go do your own research on theories
Report Post »ltb
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:19amThis just goes to show how limited science is. It’s a shame that so many people place their faith in fallible men, who come up with theories one day and discard them the next. These same people who can’t explain this explosion, because it’s billions of light years away and they are not close enough to see what’s going on, would have you believe they know what happened on the earth eons ago when they weren’t around.
Report Post »Sgt.Crust
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:19amI can see it from my Ssss…Uuuu…Vey! I wonder what Al Boring thinks about it LOL!!!!
Report Post »@leftfighter
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:23amI disagree. I think what’s most puzzling is the timliness of the story. This happened 23 trillion years ago, afterall. ;-)
Report Post »ltb
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:23amI agree, Watch! When I was a kid I remember being fascinated by the infinity of space, which helped me appreciate the eternity of God.
Report Post »@leftfighter
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:32amLadies and Gents, I apologize for my earliuer post about timliness. The news did travel 22,289,644,800,000,000,000,000 miles to get to us, afterall.
In all seriousness, the numbers on that are mindboggling. 22,289,644,800,000,000,000,000 miles.
If you had a dollar for every mile that news travelled, you could hyperinflate your way out of the debt crisis and only just barely pay it off. ;-)
Report Post »@leftfighter
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:34am@ Jaycen
Isn‘t it interesting that the person who’s repeating “open your mind” is so closed minded to God?
Just sayin’.
God bless.
Report Post »Islesfordian
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 10:55am“If we could all understand the vastness of the universe, and then see our own small insignificant plot of habitable land from orbit, we all might think our differences are smaller than we make them.”
But think of this JZS. The One who created the vastness of space-time, who is beyond measure in time and space, knows us and seeks for us to know him personally. He cares about us as we would care for our own children. This is a revelation of far greater philosophical significance that the Theory of Relativity or the knowledge that the earth orbits the sun.
Report Post »TheGreyPiper
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:34pmMaybe the rebels finally got that Death Star.
Report Post »ScreaminEagle
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 7:00pmHow long did it take for this event to become visible here and what do they mean it was pointed at us?
“This spawned an outflowing jet along the black hole’s rotational axis, and that jet is pointed directly at us from billions of light years away.”
Gulp! Rut Ro
Report Post »jzs
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 10:55pmIslesfordian, I like your post. I’m sure if you disagree or not, but I think God, if he’s out there and I hope he is, cares for all of us, not just those born in Christian countries who then became Christians. When I look at photos of Earth from space, and think of a God, I can only think of Him wanting everyone on this planet to live together.
I guess I just don’t believe this idea, held by some Christians and some Muslims (among others) that a big battle is taking place on Earth between God and the Evil, something which God observes like a football game, giving tips to His team, but otherwise staying out of the action. I don’t believe it. If God is out there, he watching to praise those those who give battle, but those who try to make peace. That’s His standard in my view, but that’s only my view.
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