Re: Blast From The Past

On Oct 30, 2:44�am, HVAC <mr.h...@gmail.com> wrote:

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array
(VLA) radio telescope have gained tantalizing insights into the nature
of the most distant object ever observed in the Universe -- a gigantic
stellar explosion known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB).

The explosion was detected on April 23 by NASA's Swift satellite, and
scientists soon realized that it was more than 13 billion light-years
from Earth. It represents an event that occurred 630 million years
after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only four percent of its
current age of 13.7 billion years.

"This explosion provides an unprecedented look at an era when the
Universe was very young and also was undergoing drastic changes. The
primal cosmic darkness was being pierced by the light of the first
stars and the first galaxies were beginning to form. The star that
exploded in this event was a member of one of these earliest
generations of stars," said Dale Frail of the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory.

Astronomers turned telescopes from around the world to study the
blast, dubbed GRB 090423. The VLA first looked for the object the day
after the discovery, detected the first radio waves from the blast a
week later, then recorded changes in the object until it faded from
view more than two months later.

"It's important to study these explosions with many kinds of
telescopes. Our research team combined data from the VLA with data
from X-ray and infrared telescopes to piece together some of the
physical conditions of the blast," said Derek Fox of Pennsylvania
State University. "The result is a unique look into the very early
Universe that we couldn't have gotten any other way," he added.

The scientists concluded that the explosion was more energetic than
most GRBs, was a nearly-spherical blast, and that it expanded into a
tenuous and relatively uniform gaseous medium surrounding the star.

Astronomers suspect that the very first stars in the Universe were
very different -- brighter, hotter, and more massive -- from those
that formed later. They hope to find evidence for these giants by
observing objects as distant as GRB 090423 or more distant.

"The best way to distinguish these distant, early-generation stars is
by studying their explosive deaths, as supernovae or Gamma Ray
Bursts," said Poonam Chandra, of the Royal Military College of Canada,
and leader of the research team. While the data on GRB 090423 don't
indicate that it resulted from the death of such a monster star, new
astronomical tools are coming that may reveal them.

"The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), will allow
us to pick out these very-distant GRBs more easily so we can target
them for intense followup observations. The Expanded Very Large Array,
with much greater sensitivity than the current VLA, will let us follow
these blasts much longer and learn much more about their energies and
environments. We'll be able to look back even further in time," Frail
said. Both ALMA and the EVLA are scheduled for completion in 2012.

Chandra, Frail and Fox worked with Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech, Edo
Berger of Harvard University, S. Bradley Cenko of the University of
California at Berkeley, Douglas C.-J. Bock of the Combined Array for
Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy in California, and Fiona
Harrison and Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech. The scientists described their
research in a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National
Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated
Universities, Inc.


All these organizations are phony fronts, pushed by debunkers, intel.
agents and useful idiots.  Please ignore posts like this for your own
peace of mind!

Sir Arthur CBE Wholeflaffers A.S.A.
President CanTech University Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics