WASHINGTON - A powerful stellar explosion detected March 19 by NASA's Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye.

"This burst was a whopper," said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It blows away every gamma ray burst we've seen so far."

Swift's Burst Alert Telescope picked up the burst at 2:12 a.m. EDT, March 19, and pinpointed the coordinates in the constellation Boötes. Telescopes in space and on the ground quickly moved to observe the afterglow. The burst is named GRB 080319B, because it was the second gamma ray burst detected that day.

Originally posted by TheHorseChestnut
I get alerts from the Swift site in my observatory, almost instantly. This event here occured little after midnight local time, and I was observing during this event. I slewed my scope to the coordinates and did observe the event. Incidently, it was observable more then 1 second. More like 48 minutes.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions the Universe has seen since the Big Bang. They occur approximately once per day and are brief, but intense, flashes of gamma radiation. They come from all different directions of the sky and last from a few milliseconds to a few hundred seconds. So far scientists do not know what causes them. Do they signal the birth of a black hole in a massive stellar explosion? Are they the product of the collision of two neutron stars? Or is it some other exotic phenomenon that causes these bursts?