A tremendous explosion has occurred in the nearby universe and major telescopes across Earth and space are investigating. Dubbed GRB 130427A, the
gamma-ray burst was first detected by the Earth-orbiting Fermi and Swift satellites
observing at high energies and quickly reported down to Earth. Within three minutes, the half-meter ISON telescope in
New Mexico found the blast in visible light, noted its extreme brightness, and relayed more exact coordinates. Within the next few minutes, the bright optical counterpart was being tracked by several quickly re-pointable telescopes including the 2.0-meter
P60 telescope in
California, the 1.3-meter
PAIRITEL telescope in
Arizona, and the 2.0-meter
Faulkes Telescope North in
Hawaii. Within two hours, the 8.2-meter
Gemini North telescope in Hawaii noted a redshift of 0.34, placing the explosion about 5 billion
light years away -- considered nearby in cosmological terms. Previously recorded images from the
RAPTOR full-sky monitors were scanned and a very bright optical counterpart --
magnitude 7.4 -- was
found 50 seconds
before the Swift trigger. The brightest burst in recent years, a
signal from GRB 130427A has also been found in low energy
radio waves by the
Very Large Array (VLA) and at the highest energies ever recorded by the
Fermi satellite.
Neutrino,
gravitational wave, and telescopes designed to detect only extremely high energy photons are
checking their data for a GRB 130427A signal. Pictured in the
above animation, the entire gamma-ray sky is shown becoming momentarily dominated by the intense glow of
GRB 130427A. Continued tracking the optical counterpart will surely be ongoing as there is a
possibility that the glow of a classic supernova will soon emerge.