Fortunately, giant gamma ray burst was far enough away, mankind was spared

By SETH BORENSTEIN

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Astronomers call it the monster. It was the biggest and brightest cosmic explosion ever witnessed. Had it been closer, Earth would have been toast.

Because the blast was 3.7 billion light-years away, mankind was spared. But orbiting telescopes got the fireworks show of a lifetime in April.

What happened was a gamma ray burst, an explosion that happens when a massive star dies, collapses into a new black hole, creates a supernova and ejects energetic radiation as bright as can be as it travels across the universe.

NASA telescopes in orbit have seen these types of bursts for more than two decades, spotting one every couple of days. But this one was special. It set records, according to four studies published Thursday in the journal Science.

It flooded NASA instruments with five times the energy as its nearest competitor, a blast in 1999, said University of Alabama at Huntsville astrophysicist Rob Preece, author of one of the studies.

It started with a star that has 20 to 30 times the mass of our sun, but is only a couple of times bigger in width, so it is incredibly dense. It exploded in a certain violent way.

“I call it the monster,” Preece said. And he wasn’t alone. One of the other studies, not written by Preece, used the word “monster” in its title, unusual language for a scientific report.