Black Hole's 'Birth Scream' Heard Across Universe

Six months ago, satellite telescopes spotted an exceptionally bright burst of energy that would have been the most distant object in the universe ever visible to the naked eye, if anyone had noticed it.

Even though no humans have reported seeing it directly, the gamma-ray burst, an explosion that signals the violent death of a massive star, is changing theories of how these events look.

Gamma-ray bursts are typically accompanied by intense releases of other forms of radiation, from X-rays to visible light.

This burst, dubbed GRB 080319B, was first detected by the Swift satellite on March 19, while the spacecraft was serendipitously looking at another gamma-ray burst in the same area of the sky.

The light it emitted in the visible part of the spectrum was so intense that the burst would have been visible to the naked eye in the constellation Bootes for about 40 seconds.

No other gamma-ray burst has ever been visible without a telescope.

The incredible amount of energy given off across the entire electromagnetic spectrum during a gamma-ray burst is what Jonathan Grindlay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls "the birth pangs of a black hole. This is the scream."

It took the light of GRB 080319B about 7.4 billion years to reach Earth, placing the explosion "more than halfway back to the Big Bang and the origin of our universe," Grindlay wrote in an editorial accompanying a new study of the burst in the Sept. 10 issue of the journal Nature.

This means that the explosion happened 3 billion years before the sun or Earth even formed, Grindlay added.

When astronomers see such distant objects, they are in effect looking back in time.

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{ Imagine that? Suddenly seeing something that happened over seven billion years ago. Something that took place three million years before our planet even existed. Like seeing the ghost of someone long dead. The violent death of a massive star and the birth of a black hole. A "birth scream" heard across the universe. It really is looking into the past.

Imagine the things that have happened out there in the vastness of space yet to be displayed. What wonders await us someday out of the blue? Perhaps many of the stars we see at night have winked out or exploded and we are studying a night sky that disappeared millions, even billions of years ago. Maybe our night sky is full of ghosts. Nothing but the distant light of long dead stars. After all.....all we know for sure is our own star is there because we feel it's heat daily. The rest.....who knows?

Someone once said something to the effect that "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine....it's stranger than we CAN imagine." What an extraordinary journey of discovery we are on. Everything that makes up our bodies was once in the fiery furnace of a star. We are in search of our birth place and we are the stuff that stars are made of.}