Holy Haleakala! Yesterday, a gamma-ray burst went off that was so bright that had you been looking at the right spot in the sky you could have seen it with just your own eyes!
It's difficult to put this into the proper context. GRBs are monumental explosions, the exploding of a massive star where most of the energy of the catastrophe is channeled into twin beams of energy. These beams scream out from the explosion like cosmic blowtorches, and for thousands of light years anything they touch is destroyed. Happily for us, GRBs always appear hundreds of millions or billions of light years away. Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That's roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating. The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much ...
