Halfway across the universe a record was broken by a little known Star whom always believed it could. it's day in the sun was so bright that it could been seen here on earth by the naked eye. Did you see it?
"The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday.
The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said.
It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour.
Telescopic measurements show that the burst -- which occurred when the universe was about half its current age -- was bright enough to be seen without a telescope." MSNBC
Neither did I, and I'm bummed.
I can't say that I am qualified in any way on the subject of Astronomy but I may have seen what you are referring to above. I am an airline pilot based in Hong Kong and on the evening of Thursday 13th of March whilst flying from Shanghai down the East coast of China to Hong Kong at 40,000 feet I saw very clearly what initially appeared to be a comet that wasn't moving. This happened at 1130 UTC. It appeared as a bright star very high in the Western sky with a triangular dispersion initially out to its right hand side but slowly moving back towards the star itself and expanding as it became fainter. The center, bright star itself became fainter as this was occurring. A glow continued to expand and grow fainter all around this star as I continued to watch. We began our decent into Hong Kong shortly afterwards but it was slowly expanding and becoming fainter as I took my last look.
Posted by: Richard Chomley | March 24, 2008 at 07:46 PM
Wow, what a great account and interesting read. Thanks!
Posted by: Mpaper | March 25, 2008 at 10:43 AM