Skylog: Neutrino News

NASA's Swift telescope spots 630 million years old supernova

This week NASA's orbiting observatory, the Swift Telescope has discovered a gamma-ray burst from an exploding star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, which equates to around five percent of its current age, the space agency said in a statement.

Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

 On April 23 the Swift Telescope detected the most distant cosmic explosion ever witnessed. a 10-second explosive burst of light.

The incredible distance to this burst exceeded our greatest expectations -- it was a true blast from the past," says Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The burst occurred at 3:55 a.m. EDT on April 23rd. Swift quickly pinpointed the explosion, allowing telescopes on Earth to target the burst before its afterglow faded away. Astronomers working in Chile and the Canary Islands independently measured the explosion's redshift. It was 8.2, smashing the previous record of 6.7 set by an explosion in September 2008. A redshift of 8.2 corresponds to a distance of 13.035 billion light years.

"We're seeing the demise of a star -- and probably the birth of a black hole -- in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations," says Derek Fox at Pennsylvania State University.

Swift is a multi-wavelength space-based observatory dedicated to the study of gamma-ray burst (GRB) science. Its three instruments work together to observe GRBs and their afterglows in the gamma-ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical wavebands.