Astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge probed the early universe's rate of growth with 52 extremely distant gamma ray bursts (GRBs), sparked by black holes formed at the hearts of gigantic exploding stars.
Colin Norman, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, and his collaborators sifted through the data and turned up a nugget of gold: an extremely bright and distant x-ray source.
The most distant observed gamma ray burst was GRB 090423, which had a redshift of.
If all goes well, Europe's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM) will capture images of very distant, fluctuating x-rays, such as those produced by black holes or supernovas.
Not only does it smash the previous record for most distant object a gamma-ray burst that went off 13 billion years ago but it is also the first object to be detected from an era when the universe was just emerging from an opaque veil of hydrogen gas.
That might manifest itself in observations of gamma ray bursters, distant gargantuan outbursts by an upcoming NASA satellite called Glast (gamma ray large area space telescope), scheduled for launching in 2006.
Light rays from distant objects pass through these two components and are focused into a sharp image on the light-sensitive retina.
The laws of physics do not rule out midsize black holes, and in the 1980's Dr. Giuseppina Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics observed moderately bright sources of X-rays in distant galaxies and suggested that they might come from such holes.
In recent years, one such mission, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, produced exquisite baby pictures of the Big Bang, while another, the Swift satellite, has helped solve a 30-year-old mystery, linking distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts to the formation of black holes.
Distant stations, where seismic rays are near vertical, contribute mainly to the determination of focal depths.
