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Thread: Very Strange Coincidence... Oh, and this if off topic...

  1. #1
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    Default Very Strange Coincidence... Oh, and this if off topic...

    What a strange universe we live in. Something strange happened the other day, March 19th. We have a satellite in space called SWIFT, which spends its life looking for gamma ray bursts, which typically preceeds the appearance of a supernova. Which happen quite often, however are not typically close enough, or bright enough to see. Well, on March 19th, SWIFT recorded 4 gamma ray bursts in one day, which is a record. Not only that, but one of them ended up resulting in the most luminous explosion ever recored in space. So bright, that for an hour, if you were to go outside in the early morning, you could have seen it with your naked eye. Now typically, to see a super nova, it is of a star within our own galaxy. Not this one, this one was well outside our galaxy. In fact, it was 7.5 Billion light years away. So the explosion actually occured long before the Sun and planet Earth formed. Truely an incredible event. Perhaps whats most amazing, is that all of these record setting events occured on March 19th, the day Arthur C. Clarke passed away... What are the odds?

    http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080320_grb
    Last edited by DZ; 03-22-2008 at 19:16.

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    Wow - that is pretty interesting, I wish I would have seen it!

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    that was totally the death star blowing up

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    This is probably a silly question but how do they know it was 7.5 billion light years away?
    I presume they would need at least three methods of recording the distance so that they can triangulate the distance!
    What do they use to measure distances that great?
    My tape measure only goes up to 10 metres LOL

    Jim

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    Although I am rusty on the science behind it - astronomers can calculate stuff like that with the red shift. I would assume that is how they did it in this case, but I am not positive. It can be some pretty intense physics, but very interesting at that!

    RE: Death star - haha

    Quote Originally Posted by JimBo View Post
    This is probably a silly question but how do they know it was 7.5 billion light years away?
    I presume they would need at least three methods of recording the distance so that they can triangulate the distance!
    What do they use to measure distances that great?
    My tape measure only goes up to 10 metres LOL

    Jim

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