GRB 080319B

GRB 080319B, um objecto situado a 7 biliões de anos-luz, esteve visível a olho nú durante 2 horas. Foi no dia 19 de Março. É o objecto mais distante que alguma vez esteve visível a olho nú.

Um GRB, Gamma Ray Burst, resulta da explosão de uma estrela. É difícil dar uma ideia da potência do GRB 080319B. Esta é a melhor descrição que encontrei:

Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.

The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.

In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.
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The extremely luminous afterglow of GRB 080319B was imaged by Swift’s X-ray Telescope (left) and Optical/Ultraviolet Telescope (right). Credit: NASA

Adicionalmente:
The burst was detected by Swift at 2:12 ET on March 19 and was one of five gamma-ray bursts detected that day, the same day that famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died.
“Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the universe ablaze with gamma-ray bursts,” said Swift science team member Judith Racusin, a Penn State graduate student.