AAVSO Alert Notice 372: Possible naked-eye gamma ray burst detected (GRB 080319B)



If you have seen or photographed it, let them know!

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Yep.

This is it.

The monster event everyone has been waiting for.

Swift detected a GRB this morning, GRB 080319A. It slewed to the GRB (which was discovered to have a very faint optical afterglow), and several robotic telescope systems observed it too - mostly without results. Several of these systems have wide-field sky imagers that reach 8th - 12 magnitude in single shots, usually a domain where afterglows don't get to.

But not long after, just roughly 10 degrees away, another GRB exploded, and this one was a blast. It's one of the brightest GRBs ever detected!! Since quite a few robots were already pointing in this direction, at least three wide-field systems recorded images before and during the explosion which lastet about a minute. One of these is a video system that seems to yield a time resolution of maybe a second per image or so.

Of course, multiple larger robots then slewed to the GRB, some of them also catching the peak magnitudes.

The peak magnitudes reported still diverge a bit, but the consensus is ~ 5.5!!!

Therefore, as mentioned before, under dark skies it was visible to the naked eye!!!!

Now, the real clou is that the redshift is 0.937!! This means the GRB exploded roughly when the universe was half it's current age, and the distance to the event is very roughly 10 BILLION light years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Furthermore, I've just figured out that this event was nothing less than the brightest optical flash ever detected. The luminosoty at peak exceeds 10^17 solar luminosities, so this basically outshines the entire universe for a few seconds. :O

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David Alexander Kann
PhD student, Gamma-Ray burst Afterglow Collaboration at ESO
Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg

<span style='color:blue'>Ignite our minds and let's burn brighter
These are the wonders at your feet</span>
<span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'>- Dark Tranquillity, The Wonders At Your Feet</span>

If current theories are correct

Sonoma GRB Real-time map

GRB 080319E 2008/03/19 17:05:09 Swift 06:37:55 23:56:00
GRB 080319D 2008/03/19 12:25:56 Swift 17:15:53 55:24:35
GRB 080319C 2008/03/19 06:12:49 Swift 14:31:42 36:18:10
GRB 080319B 2008/03/19 05:45:42 Swift 13:45:24 44:04:44
GRB 080319A 2008/03/19 01:57:09 Swift 16:18:32 -15:16:30

Of course, GodlikeProductions (warning: adult -- juvenile, actually -- language, and lack of critical thinking) has an I'm-freaking-out topic.

Do I see the most on a day, in the last 4 years, was 3 (5 times previous)?

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This is fascinating, and will keep astrophysicists busy for months, no doubt. I look forward to follow-up analyses.

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"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
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I imagine this dark room (the universe) in which a flash bulb goes off.

"exceeds 10^17 solar luminosities" <- I can't even comprehend that.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

Jeez, you must be kidding!

I was expecting a close one, like a few hundreds of millions of light years.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

I have my own theory. A GRB must cause a huge ionization. This in turn causes the light from it to be redshifted by the Compton effect. Thus, the GRB redshift is intrinsic and not a measure of distance or velocity of the source. This is the same as the large (nearly 1%) red shift on the sun seen in the gamma spectrum by HESSI during a solar flare. The sun doesn't suddenly temporarily appear at the red shift distance nor does it move away from us. http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/adminst...03_ajl_L81.pdf

GRB redshifts are measured using absorption features from their surrounding host galaxy, not from emission lines from the GRB itself. Redshifts seen in GRBs are purely cosmological, not intrinsic, so their estimated distances are sound. GRB 080319B is very bright, and very distant. A truly exciting event.

dr_lha,

This is one of John's "pet ponies", like "pushing gravity" and "intelligent molecular clouds in interstellar space" that he trots out every once in a while!

Oh yeah. Welcome to BAUT!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

NASA Satellite Detects Naked-Eye Explosion Halfway Across Universe -with photos from Swift X-ray and Optical/Ultraviolet Telescope.
Someone caught it with a CCD on their 400mm reflector here.

Wonderful data from "Pi of the sky":
http://grb.fuw.edu.pl/pi/index.html

The coincidence of the optical and gamma radiation within 10 seconds has implications that there is no wavelength dependence on the index of refraction of the interstellar and intergalactic medium.

After a certain point, your ability to see is just completely overwhelmed, so for an individual's understanding, that measure is less one of how really bright the event was, than it is of how REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY far away anything with some form of vision similar to ours would want to be if they wanted to ensure that wasn't the last thing they ever saw from behind their utterly fried optic nerves.

That kind of bright makes burning magnesium look like moonlight through mirrored sunglasses.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Isn't it more likely to have been a highly directional ray from a distant GRB, rather than a flashbulb burst which shone in all directions at once?

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

Thanks John for that wonderful link. for the Pi in the sky team and their contribution to the wavelength dependence question. In terms of the overall energy release, This thing was VERY far away. Even if we happened to be in the limited 'cone' of projection, The energy required to create a 5.8 magnitude burst is staggering.

Kind regards
Matt

Nice

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http://www.ryanmercer.com

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More like a laser than a flashbulb, makes you wonder how many of these miss us on a constant basis.

Just out of curiosity,at which distances it would have to be to completely obliterate the Earth (fully), melt all of Earth, just melt the crust, melt 1 km of the crust, melt crust 1 meter deep,evaporate all the atmosphere, boil the seas, exterminate life,cause mass extintion and cause a cool aurora display visible from the entire Earth while disrupting electronics assuming, that it's luminosity is 10¹⁷ Suns?
How it can be calculated?

Well, luminosity drops as inverse squared, i.e. if the at the original distance d the luminosity is L (which you need to know), then at twice as far (2*d) luminosity is 1/(L*L) = 1/L², at 4*d luminosity is only 1/L⁴ and so on (in other words, the amount of energy drops rather rapidly).

You also must know how much energy is needed to for example to melt the crust of of the Earth; then find a distance at which the energy of the burst is same and so on...

In order to cause a mass extinction, the burst has to within a couple of thousand light years. But to really fry up the Earth it must be located really close.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/...t-Killers.html

Well, according to this website, the energz needed to completelz destroy Earth would be roughly 5E16 megatons..

Would someone do the maths for me pls?I am no good at maths.

There's a cure for that: study it.

5 · 10¹⁶ megatons? If the BA is right, the Sun produces 100 billion = 10¹¹ megatons worth of energy every second. The GRB released million million million times (= 10¹⁸) more energy in the few seconds it lasted (= 10¹¹ · 10¹⁸ = 10^{11 + 18} = 10²⁹ Mt). In other words, you could blow up the Earth 10²⁹ / (5 · 10¹⁶) = 2 · 10^{28 - 16} = 2 · 10¹² times. That's 2 trillion times. Even if the number is a few orders of magnitude off, it is still a mindbogglingly insane number.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman