Record-breaking X-ray blast briefly blinds space observatory
A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy's neighbourhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA's Swift space observatory earlier this summer, astronomers now report. The X-rays traveled through space for 5-billion years before slamming into and overwhelming Swift's X-ray Telescope on 21 June. The blindingly bright blast came from a gamma-ray burst, a violent eruption of energy from the explosion of a massive star morphing into a new black hole. 'This gamma-ray burst is by far the brightest light source ever seen in X-ray wavelengths at cosmological distances,' said David Burrows, senior scientist and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and the lead scientist for Swift's X-ray Telescope (XRT)...