They are shooting at us again! (from far, far away...)

[n2doc]

Hubble Pinpoints Location Of Record-breaking Cosmic Explosion

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2008) — Peering across 7.5 billion light-years and halfway back to the Big Bang, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the fading optical counterpart of a powerful gamma ray burst that holds the record for being the intrinsically brightest naked-eye object ever seen from Earth. For nearly a minute this single star was as bright as 10 million galaxies.

Hubble Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) images taken on Monday, April 7 show the fading optical counterpart of the titanic blast. The object erupted in a brilliant flash of gamma rays and other electromagnetic radiation at 2:12 a.m. EDT on March 19, and was detected by Swift, NASA's gamma ray burst watchdog satellite.
Immediately after the explosion, the gamma ray burst glowed as a dim 5th magnitude "star" in the spring constellation Bootes. Designated GRB 080319B, the intergalactic firework has been fading away ever since then.



Peering across 7.5 billion light-years and halfway back to the Big Bang, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the fading optical counterpart of a powerful gamma ray burst that holds the record for being the intrinsically brightest naked-eye object ever seen from Earth. (Credit: Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Tanvir (University of Leicester), and A. Fruchter (STScI))

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080410200302.htm

snip:

Called a long-duration gamma ray burst, such events are theorized to be caused by the death of a very massive star, perhaps weighing as much as 50 times our Sun. Such explosions, sometimes dubbed "hypernovae," are more powerful than ordinary supernova explosions and are far more luminous, in part because their energy seems to be concentrated into a blowtorch-like beam that, in this case, was aimed directly at Earth.