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"      Break out the superlatives: Today in the journal Science, a NASA team reports on the brightest, longest, most powerful gamma ray burst they&amp;#039;ve ever seen. And this sighting could change what they know about these incredible cosmic flashes. The blast is the baddest of a supremely powerful kind of cosmic event. Gamma ray bursts (GRB) happen when a giant star, tens of times as massive as the sun, collapses into a black hole, and that black hole fires twin jets of radiation across the universe. Gamma rays are the most powerful kind of electromagnetic radiation, at the far end of the spectrum. The jets emit these rays with a half-million times more energy than visible light, and the bursts\u2014thought to be could when the jets slam into surrounding material and cause a shock wave\u2014can be even more powerful. You have to be looking at the black hole from just the right angle to see these jets, but they&amp;#039;re common enough that NASA now spots about one every couple of days.      This one was extraordinary. &amp;quot;This burst was a once-in-a-century cosmic event,&amp;quot; NASA Astrophysics Division director Paul Hertz told reporters today. A series of NASA telescopes, including Fermi, Swift, and Nu-Star, observed the GRB on April 27 and watched its afterglow across many regions of light, finding it to be the longest-lasting burst they&amp;#039;ve seen, to have the most explosion energy, the most total photons, and other adjectives. &amp;quot;GRB 130427A emits gamma rays longer than any previous gamma ray burst, with multi-billion electron volt radiation. There were detected for nearly a day, compared to 100 minutes for the earlier record-setter,&amp;quot; says Charles Dermer of the Naval Research Laboratory. The Fermi telescope, which made these initial finds, also detected the highest-energy photon ever seen, measuring 95 billion electron volts, Dermer says. The record-setting burst also pokes holes in scientists&amp;#039; understanding of GRBs. &amp;quot;Why do some of the highest-energy photons appear hours after the initial blast? This is hard to explain with our current models,&amp;quot; Dermer said. Furthermore, he said, the gamma ray emissions appear to be much more connected with emissions in the visible part of the spectrum than scientists had expected; they know that because the RAPTOR-T observatory, which uses four 0.4-meter technicolor telescopes, captured the new GRB in optical wavelengths\u2014it&amp;#039;s a slowly fading blue dot in the video. Meanwhile, NuStar, an X-Ray telescope, took advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime sighting to image the GRB in the X-ray range, raising more questions. &amp;quot;This burst was so well-observed that our understanding is taking a beating,&amp;quot; Dermer says.  Although GRB 130427A lit up the sky (by celestial standards, anyway), the source of the burst is still 3.7 billion light years away. So don&amp;#039;t get too worried about a high-powered burst wiping out life on Earth. The explosion would have to be much, much closer, and GRBs are rare to begin with\u2014the average galaxy gets one about once every 10 millions years. &amp;quot;The chance of anything happening tomorrow is virtually nil,&amp;quot; Dermer said. But don&amp;#039;t get too comfortable. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/telescopes/a9740/one-of-the-brightest-bursts-nasa-has-ever-seen-16184158/>