Look! This distant galaxy hosted the most powerful explosion since the Big Bang
the little one The dim, red dot in the center of the newly released image of a distant galaxy indicates the galaxy underwent one of the most powerful explosions since the Big Bang. Astronomer Brendan O’Connor and his colleagues recently discovered this as-yet-unnamed galaxy 9 billion light-years away in data from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawai’i, and they say it is the source of a brilliant, bright beam of gamma radiation. brief dazzling NASA. Swift Observatory in late 2015. Imagine an explosion releasing as much energy as our Sun would in 10 billion years – compressed into an explosion in less than two seconds. Astronomers call this almost unimaginable catastrophe a short gamma-ray burst, and the universe hasn’t seen a brighter or more powerful explosion since the Big Bang. What could cause such an event? The answer appears to involve two colliding neutron stars. Binary star systems are not very rare in the universe; one of our closest neighbors, Alpha Centauri, is actually