Across the Universe

Oops, I'm supposed to be working but all I can do is read geek blogsites...this one is quite good, the pictures on the left are not much to look at, until you realise what they are. A so-called GRB is formed when two superdense stars collide and form a black hole. The resulting carnage is bright enough to be seen for a few seconds across the universe. The one on the right is GRB080913, which is the most distant GRB ever detected, at a numbing 12.8 billion light years away. In other words, when the star died to create this explosion, the Universe was less than a billion years old… and when it reached Earth, the light from this ancient detonation had been crossing the reaches of space almost 13 billion years, since before the Earth was born, before the Sun formed, before there was even a Milky Way Galaxy. All I can say is wow.