Thursday, March 09, 2006

Most distant cosmic explosion was a star collapsing into a black hole

Fortunately not everyone rejects science. When I read reports like
this, my faith in humanity is restored. On September 4, 2005 scientists detected the most distant cosmic explosion ever. It was 13 billion light years away which means it happened during the first billion years of the universe.

"We designed Swift to look for faint bursts coming from the edge of the universe," said Neil Gehrels of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Swift's principal investigator. "Now we've got one and it's fascinating. For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there."

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