Judy Racusin, a Fermi project coordinator and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, attended the conference.
“It’s safe to say this meeting kicked off with a bang. Everyone’s talking about this.”
“It’s a very unique event,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, reported.
“It’s like pointing a telescope at the sun,” Cendes explained. “It saturated the detectors.”
According to NASA, the blast “ranks among the most luminous events known.”
The huge gamma-ray light show
Space scientists say supernovas are created by the collapse and explosion of enormous stars.
Only the most massive stars go supernova. They are usually about 8 times the size of the Earth’s sun. But to produce a powerful gamma-ray burst, the exploding star must be at least 30 to 40 times the size of our sun.
The tremendous explosion happened 2 billion light-years from Earth. And the energy and light have been traveling through space for eons.
Gamma rays radiate on the spectrum of AM and FM radio, or x-rays. It is not dangerous to humans since it has been spread and dissipated through space for a billion light years.
