Weird Science Cool Pic of the Week
Astronomers have all got very excited about this picture this week.
The orange blob in the middle is a star which exploded 13.1 billion years ago and is the most distant object ever spotted from Earth.
It went kaboom just 640 million years after the big bang, a universal whisker after the dawn of time (woooooo!). Click on the pic for a better view.
Nasa's orbiting observatory Swift picked up the gamma-ray burst from the explosion which saw a massive, spinning star run out of fuel and collapse into a black hole.
Within an hour of the discovery, lots of Earth-based telescopes all pointed at the same spot in the sky to take in the view.
While it is cool to see something so far away, scientists hope it will help come up with an answer to when the universe cooled down enough for matter to form the first generations of stars.
Just how far away was the explosion? Well, multiply 6 trillion miles by 13.1 billion. I'll let you do the math!
Weird Science Factoid: Most lipsticks contain fish scales. Bleghhhh!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
You can see the dust clouds quite clearly - that's a great picture. Thanks for the info.
This could be another evidence of a Big Bang. However, until now, the laboratory tests seems to show that this is very uncertain. cazare predeal