No kidding. Our Italian physicist friend Dorigo passed along the note on his blog, Quantum Diaries Survivor. George Gliba at NASA (gliba@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov) hopes someone was watching Bootës at about 6:10 UT (which would be about 1:10 a.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT), if I’m calculating that correctly).
Gliba said:
Last night the NASA SWIFT spacecraft saw the most extrinsically luminous Gamma-ray Burst ever known. Some ground based telescopes recorded the visual optical afterglow to be 5th magnitude!
Here’s your chance to make science history: If you may have seen the thing, or better, if you have a videotape of the incident (which may have lasted a few minutes), scientists would sure love to see it.
Here’s what the Swift telescope captured:
The extremely luminous afterglow of GRB 080319B was imaged by Swift’s X-ray Telescope (left) and Optical/Ultraviolet Telescope (right). This was by far the brightest gamma-ray burst afterglow ever seen. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler, et al.
So, did you see it? Call George Gliba; details, Gliba’s note to physicists and astronomers below the fold.
Most gamma ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. Their cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars, releasing an intense burst of high-energy gamma rays and ejecting particle jets that rip through space at nearly the speed of light like turbocharged cosmic blowtorches. When the jets plow into surrounding interstellar clouds, they heat the gas, often generating bright afterglows. Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe since the big bang.
“This burst was a whopper,” said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It blows away every gamma ray burst we’ve seen so far.”
Calculations show this one was 7 billion light years away. Cool!
Posted by Ed Darrell 
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