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Most distant cosmic blast sighted

Swift could potentially see bursts from even greater distances
Astronomers have witnessed the most distant cosmic explosion on record: a gamma-ray burst that has come from the edge of the visible Universe.

Gamma-ray bursts are intense flares of high-energy radiation that appear without warning from across the cosmos.

They can release as much energy in a few minutes as our Sun will emit in its expected 10-billion-year lifetime.

The blast was observed by the Swift space telescope and by a number of ground-based observatories.


This is an amazing result that will enable us to find out more about stars from near the beginning of time

Keith Mason, chief executive PParc

The latest, record gamma-ray burst was detected on 4 September, 2005, and lasted about three minutes. It probably marked the death of a massive star as it collapsed into a black hole.

It has a redshift of 6.29, which translates to a distance of about 13 billion light-years from Earth.

The word redshift refers to the measure astronomers use to describe the way light coming from far-distant objects is "stretched" by the expansion of the Universe.

The higher the redshift number assigned to an object, the more distant it is and the earlier it is being seen in cosmic history.

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