More News
10/28/09:
Blast from the Past Gives Clues About Early Universe
9/23/09:
ALMA Telescope Reaches New Heights
9/22/09:
High-School Student Discovers Strange Astronomical Object
9/1/09:
Precise Radio-Telescope Measure-
ments Advance Frontier Gravitational Physics
7/2/09:
VLBA Locates Origin of Super- energetic Bursts Near Giant Black Hole
News Center
Welcome to the News Center. Here you will find NRAO press releases, images, video and audio content, news articles, and other related media.
The Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, NM.
Blast from the Past Gives Clues About Early Universe
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have gained tantalizing insights into the nature of the most distant object ever observed in the Universe -- a gigantic stellar explosion known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB).
The explosion was detected on April 23 by NASA's Swift satellite, and scientists soon realized that it was more than 13 billion light-years from Earth. It represents an event that occurred 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only four percent of its current age of 13.7 billion years.
"This explosion provides an unprecedented look at an era when the Universe was very young and also was undergoing drastic changes. The primal cosmic darkness was being pierced by the light of the first stars and the first galaxies were beginning to form. The star that exploded in this event was a member of one of these earliest generations of stars," said Dale Frail of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Astronomers turned telescopes from around the world to study the blast, dubbed GRB 090423. The VLA first looked for the object the day after the discovery, detected the first radio waves from the blast a week later, then recorded changes in the object until it faded from view more than two months later...
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Associated Universities, Inc.