Latest Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission Stories

PSU -- It came from the edge of the visible universe, the most distant explosion ever detected. In this week's issue of Nature, scientists at Penn State University and their U.S. and European colleagues discuss how this explosion, detected on 4 September 2005, was the result of a massive star collapsing into a black hole. The explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, comes from an era soon after stars and galaxies first formed, about 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The universe...

NASA -- Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite have detected a new kind of cosmic explosion. The event appears to be a precursor to a supernova, which is expected to reach peak brightness in about a week's time. UK astronomers and their colleagues around the world are watching closely as they have never seen an explosion of this kind before. Satellites and the world's largest telescopes are now trained on the sight, watching and waiting. The explosion has the trappings of a gamma-ray burst...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new kind of cosmic explosion has been spotted in Earth's celestial neighborhood, and amateur astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere might be able to see it next week, scientists reported on Thursday.The blast seemed a lot like a gamma-ray burst, the most distant and powerful type of explosion known to astronomers.But when scientists first detected it with NASA's Swift satellite on February 18, the explosion was about 25 times closer and lasted 100 times longer than a...

Carnegie -- Cosmic gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, have the extreme brilliance of a billion billion Suns and occur several times a day. But they are not all created equal. For several decades astronomers have known that two types exist--long ones that last for tens or hundreds of seconds, and short bursts, which last a few milliseconds to a second. Intense research over the last decade has shown that long bursts are the death throes of massive stars in distant,...

An international team of astronomers led by Danish astronomer Jens Hjorth [1] has for the first time observed the visible light from a short gamma-ray burst (GRB). Using the 1.5m Danish telescope at La Silla (Chile), they showed that these short, intense bursts of gamma-ray emission most likely originate from the violent collision of two merging neutron stars. The same team has also used ESO's Very Large Telescope to constrain the birthplace of the first ever short burst whose position could...

HONOLULU (AP) -- Telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii recorded the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen, probably caused by the collapse of a massive dying star, according to University of Hawaii astronomers. Astronomers from Japan and Hawaii used the telescopes to measure a dying star some 12.8 billion light years away, at the edge of the known universe. The burst released about as much energy as the sun will emit during its 10 billion year lifespan, according to Lennox Cowie, an...

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...

NASA's Swift satellite and ground-based telescopes have discovered the most distant exploding star on record, confirming a 1999 prediction made by University of Chicago astrophysicist Don Lamb and Daniel Reichart, who was then a graduate student at Chicago. Now a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Reichart led the team that discovered the afterglow of the explosion, called a gamma-ray burst (GRB), which culminated in the confirmation of his and Lamb's earlier...

Astronomers Find Farthest Known Gamma-Ray Burst with ESO VLT ESO -- An Italian team of astronomers has observed the afterglow of a Gamma-Ray Burst that is the farthest known ever. With a measured redshift of 6.3, the light from this very remote astronomical source has taken 12,700 million years to reach us. It is thus seen when the Universe was less than 900 million years old, or less than 7 percent its present age. "This also means that it is among the intrinsically brightest Gamma-Ray...

Type Ic supernovae, or hypernovae, may be source of powerful burstsBerkeley -- Observations by two of the world's largest telescopes provide strong evidence that a peculiar type of exploding star may be the origin of elusive gamma-ray bursts that have puzzled scientists for more than 30 years. A team of astronomers from Italy, Japan, Germany and the United States, including the University of California, Berkeley, conclude from observations with the Keck and Subaru telescopes in Hawaii that...