APOD 4.2

This weeks APOD is titled Across the Universe (aka best movie ever!) and is a picture of a cosmic explosion classified as GRB080319B and detected by the Swift satellite. The source of the flash is estimated to be over 7.5 billion light years away, an unfathomable distance, and is 2.5 million times more luminous than the brightest supernova we know of. Obviously this is incredibly important discovery, and by observing the optical emission during the gamma ray burst, which usually last less than 2 minutes, we c an begin to understand the mechanism releasing enormous amount of energy. It is commonly believed that in the case of GRB longer than 2 s the phenomenon is caused by a collape of a massive star ending with a formation of a black hole. However, the details of the process still remain uncertain.