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I love it when I read about stuff like this. It's just so amazing to me. It took 7.5 billion years for the light to get here. That's just mind-boggling in so many respects.
Star explodes halfway across universe - CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/03/21/exploding.star.ap/index.html - broken link)
Location: Los Angeles, which as I understand was once upon a time ago part of the United States of America
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The starburst would have appeared as bright as some of the stars in the handle of the Little Dipper constellation, said Penn State University astronomer David Burrows.
That's fairly bright, considering those stars in the "big dipper" are a cluster within our arm of the Milky Way. For light to be seen at that intensity, from 7.5 billion light years away is remarkable, given that the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 billion LY away. That was quite a gamma ray burst!
Interesting and frightening at the same time. Current thought is that the bursts from star deaths preclude the possibility of sentient life where stars are fairly dense, such as more towards the center of the Milky Way. The bursts essentially sterilize billions of miles, and no lifeforms can evolve fast enough to reach sentience before they are destroyed.
Interesting and frightening at the same time. Current thought is that the bursts from star deaths preclude the possibility of sentient life where stars are fairly dense, such as more towards the center of the Milky Way. The bursts essentially sterilize billions of miles, and no lifeforms can evolve fast enough to reach sentience before they are destroyed.
Concentrated rays from misc events have the possibility of killing massive numbers of animals on the earth, which is one of the theories behind the death of 70% of the earths animals a few hundred million years ago.
... given that the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 billion LY away.
M31 in Andromeda is about 2.5 million, not billion, light-years away. It's the nearest large galaxy to ours; the nearer ones are a step down in size. This intensifies your point, though.
There was an "ordinary" supernova in M31 back in 1885, shortly before the dawn of astronomical photography. It didn't quite make it up to naked-eye brightness.
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