With the help of a satellite and a global network of telescopes, astronomers can see and locate stellar explosions at a very long distance. A gamma-ray burst is an event caused by a star that died in one of the early stages of the universe.
The record of light that generates explosions of this type serves researchers to collect data on the evolution of the cosmos, ''its intensity exceeds that of galaxies in brightness; it releases an enormous amount of gamma rays and particles that travel at the speed of light,'' says Donald Lamb, an astrophysics expert at the University of Chicago.
The challenge faced by astronomers in the face of this phenomenon is that the gamma ray shots that produce light last only seconds before dissipating. To locate them, NASA launched the Swift satellite, which has a gamma-ray telescope that locates them in fractions of a second and sends their coordinates by e-mail to almost a thousand astronomers around the world.
The light from the bursts comes from stars that exploded when the universe was just a few hundred million years old. A gamma-ray burst offers a rare glimpse through space and time," says Nial Tanvir, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire, England.
George Ricker, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: "If we can locate such ancient explosions, we may finally go back in time to know the origin and constitution of the first stars before galaxies existed.
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