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.
Orbiting telescopes got the fireworks last spring when they spotted what is known as a gamma ray burst in a far-off galaxy. The only bigger display astronomers know of was the Big Bang — and no one, of course, was around to witness that.
“This burst was a once-in-a-century cosmic event,” NASA astrophysics chief Paul Hertz said at a news conference Thursday.
A gamma ray burst happens when a massive star dies in what’s called a supernova and ejects energetic radiation. A planet caught in one of these bursts would lose its atmosphere instantly and would be left a burned cinder, astronomers say. Because this blast was 3.7 billion light-years away, mankind was spared.
This burst, witnessed April 27, flooded NASA instruments with five times the energy of its nearest competitor, a 1999 blast, according to four studies published Thursday in the journal Science.
