>
http://www.javno.com/en-world/far-sighted--telescope-snaps-most-distant-object_254251>
>Pretty coooooool:
>
>
Astronomers tracking a mysterious blast of energy called a gamma ray burst said on Tuesday they had snapped a photograph of the most distant object in the universe -- a smudge 13 billion light-years away.
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>Hawaii's Gemini Observatory caught the image earlier this month after a satellite first detected the burst.
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>"Our infrared observations from Gemini immediately suggested that this was an unusually distant burst, these images were the smoking gun," said Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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>Distortions in the light signature of the object show it is 13 billion years old -- at the speed of light, 13 billion light-years away. A light-year is 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).
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>This makes it easily the most distant object ever seen by humanity, Berger said.
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>Gamma-ray bursts are luminous explosions that mostly occur when massive stars run out of fuel and begin collapsing into either a black hole or a neutron star.
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>"I have been chasing gamma-ray bursts for a decade, trying to find such a spectacular event," said Berger. "We now have the first direct proof that the young universe was teeming with exploding stars and newly-born black holes only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang," he said.
>Far out.
Regards. Al
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