Blast from the past

"Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite and several ground-based telescopes have detected the most distant explosion yet, a gamma-ray burst from the edge of the visible universe. This powerful burst was detected September 4. It marks the death of a massive star and the birth of a black hole. It comes from an era soon after stars and galaxies first formed, about 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

"We designed Swift to look for faint bursts coming from the edge of the Universe," said Swift principal investigator Dr. Neil Gehrels of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Now we've got one and it's fascinating. For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there," he added."

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[+] Tags: George Hopkin | Science | Pop culture