Tag Archives: brightest

This is frickin cool! A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy's neighborhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA's Swift space observatory. The X-rays traveled through space for 5-billion years before slamming into and overwhelming Swift's X-ray Telescope. The blindingly bright blast came from a gamma-ray burst, a violent eruption of energy from the explosion of a massive star morphing into a new black hole. “The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down.” “So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn't count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami.” The software soon resumed capturing the evolution of the burst over time. The scientists then were able to measure the blast's X-ray brightness at 143,000 X-ray photons per second during its period of greatest brightness, which is more that 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky — a neutron star that is more than 500,000 times closer to Earth that sends a 'mere' 10,000 photons per second streaming toward Swift's telescopes. added by: SushiBandit