11 billion-year-old gamma ray blast found in space

Artist's concept of the early stage of a gamma ray burst

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The afterglow from a cosmic explosion that occurred 11 billion years ago could give scientists a new way to measure the age of heavenly objects, astronomers reported Wednesday.

The explosion, known as a gamma ray burst, was spotted last January, and it took investigators eight months to figure out where it came from. GRB 000131, as it is known, came from the southern constellation Carina (the Keel).

Before this, the previous record holder was less than 9 billion years old, astronomers said in a statement.

Observations by a cluster of interplanetary space probes indicate that the gamma ray blast probably emanated from a monstrous dying star more than 30 times as massive as the sun, scientists said in a statement.

Their findings were to be presented Wednesday in Rome at an international meeting on gamma ray bursts, which are mysterious flashes of high-energy light that occur about once a day.

What causes these bursts is not known, but they are the most powerful explosions in the known universe, according to Kevin Hurley, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley and principal investigator of the gamma ray burst experiment aboard NASA's Ulysses spacecraft.

The explosion the scientists detected is about 11 billion light-years away. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles , the distance light travels in a year.

"The light from this gigantic flash had traveled 11 billion years before reaching the Earth and suggests that these explosive objects may provide us with the longest yardsticks yet for detecting and studying galaxies in the early universe," Hurley said in a statement.

Gamma ray bursts cannot be seen from Earth because the atmosphere absorbs them, but special spacecraft can detect traces of the gamma radiation as it heads for our planet and from this can determine which direction they came from.

Astronomers using the European Space Agency's massive telescope in Chile found an optical afterglow from the explosion, suggesting it had come from a great distance.

The network of spacecraft that detected this blast includes Ulysses, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency; NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous; and the Italian Bepposax spacecraft.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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