As attention is focused on the impending mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, one of NASA’s other orbiting observatories gave us a great reminder that visible astronomy isn’t the only game in town (where “town” equals “near earth orbit”). One of NASA’s other great success stories, the Swift observatory (we’ve mentioned it in so many stories, I’ll just link to a Google search for it) has recently spotted an unusual gamma-ray burst, caused by a supernova, that didn’t appear to arise from an object that could be detected at visible wavelengths. Follow-up observations have now confirmed that this is the most distant event of the sort ever imaged, having occurred over 13 billion years ago.

The Swift was designed to solve a long-standing problem for astronomy. Given something as big as the universe, high-energy events are happening all the time, but we could only observe them if we happened to have an instrument pointing in the right direction at the time. The Swift was designed to detect the direction of high-energy photons, and could swing its instruments to pinpoint the source rapidly. At that point, it could continue observations at gamma-ray and X-ray wavelengths on its own, while the location was relayed to telescopes that could obtain data at other wavelengths. It’s worked exactly as intended, which is why the Swift graces the science news so often.

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