Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Big Bangs




Last Friday at NASA headquarters, astronomers met to discuss the brightest explosion ever detected in our galaxy: a 0.2-second flash that packed as much punch as our sun produces in 200,000 years. The incredible flash was so bright that it knocked satellites' instruments out of whack and interfered with low-frequency radio waves on Earth.

The blast came from a rare entity called a magnetar roughly halfway across the Milky Way--50,000 light years from Earth. That may sound a long way off, but as one astrophysicist pointed out, "Astronomically speaking, this explosion happened in our backyard." If it had happened just 10,000 light years away, it might have blown away the ozone layer.

Thankfully, the nearest known magnetar is 13,000 light years from here. So what's a magnetar? Basically, it's a neutron star with a super-strong magnetic field. And what's a neutron star? It's the remnant of a different sort of stellar explosion--a supernova.


Want to learn more?
See shots of December's big blast

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