Naked-eye gamma-ray burst

By Michael on March 21, 2008 at 12:14 am | In Blog Posts | 2 Comments

Gamma Ray Burst
The folks at the Pi in the Sky project imaged a recent gamma-ray burst and it looks like it got bright enough to be seen by the unaided eye. It looks like it would have been visible for only 10-20 seconds and it would have been about as bright as the faintest starts you can see. So it’s unlikely that anyone saw it. Still, it’s pretty cool.

There’s more info from NASA and the AAVSO High Energy Network.

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  1. Wow! Wouldn’t it be cool if someone did see it visually and wondered “Hey! What was that?!”

    This burst’s designation is GRB 080319B with digits of name indicating the year(08), the month(03), and the day(19) it was seen and the B indicating it was the second one of the day.

    Googling the name finds a lot of sites. It’s amazing how quickly observers reacted. The notification system works.

    It looks like there are 3 Slacker Astronomy podcasts about GRBs linked from the Slackerpedia entry and Episode 6 of Astronomy Cast focusses on them.

    Comment by bethkatz17582 — March 21, 2008 #

  2. [...] Read more about this at NASA and at Slacker Astronomy [...]

    Pingback by Gamma Ray Burst in Bootes | Astronomy-Page: Articles — March 30, 2008 #

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