A Visible GRB

Source: ESO
Image Credit: Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital

On 19 March, Nature was particularly generous and provided astronomers with the wealth of four gamma-ray bursts on the same day. But that was not all: one of them is the most luminous object ever observed in the Universe. Despite being located in a distant galaxy, billions of light years away, it was so bright that it could have been seen, for a brief while, with the unaided eye. One of these bursts happened 7.5 billion light-years away but was so intense that should the burst have exploded in our Galaxy, it would have lit up the night sky for several minutes as if it were daytime.(read more)