A Big Bang a Long Way Away
If you were a lucky insomniac yesterday morning (wednesday about midnight am), and happened to be looking in the right place of the sky, you would have seen a mega-explosion that happened halfway across the universe (note: not “galaxy”). This super-explosion happened approximately 7.5 billion years ago and the light was just visible with the naked human eye wednesday for a few minutes.
“No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked eye at such an immense distance,” says Swift science team member Stephen Holland of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We don’t know yet if anyone was looking at the afterglow at the time it brightened to peak visibility. But if someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time, they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid.”