NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Gamma-Ray Burst Offers First Peek at a Young Galaxy's Star Factory

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GRB 080607 exploded June 7, 2008, in the constellation Coma Berenices. The box indicates the sky area shown in the Swift image. Credit: DSS/STScI/AURA Astronomers combining data from NASA's Swift satellite, the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and other facilities have, for the first time, identified gas molecules in the host galaxy of a gamma-ray burst.

The explosion, designated GRB 080607, occurred in June. "This burst gave us the opportunity to 'taste' the star-forming gas in a young galaxy more than 11 billion light-years away," says University of California, Santa Cruz, professor Xavier Prochaska. The finding provides insight into star formation when the universe was about one-sixth its present age.

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NASA's Swift Shows Active Galaxies Are Different Near and Far

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Swift's Hard X-ray Survey offers the first unbiased census of active galactic nuclei in decades. Dense clouds of dust and gas, illustrated here, can obscure less energetic radiation from an active galaxy's central black hole. High-energy X-rays, however, easily pass through. Credit: ESA/NASA/AVO/Paolo Padovani An ongoing X-ray survey undertaken by NASA's Swift spacecraft is revealing differences between nearby active galaxies and those located about halfway across the universe. Understanding these differences will help clarify the relationship between a galaxy and its central black hole.

"There's a lot we don't know about the workings of supermassive black holes," says Richard Mushotzky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Astronomers think the intense emission from the centers, or nuclei, of active galaxies arises near a central black hole containing more than a million times the sun's mass. "Some of these feeding black holes are the most luminous objects in the universe. Yet we don't know why the massive black hole in our own galaxy and similar objects are so dim."

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Mission Update:

For mission updates visit the Swift Mission Director's Status Report Log.

Swift is a first-of-its-kind multi-wavelength observatory dedicated to the study of gamma-ray burst (GRB) science. Its three instruments will work together to observe GRBs and afterglows in the gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical wavebands. The main mission objectives for Swift are to:

• Determine the origin of gamma-ray bursts
• Classify gamma-ray bursts and search for new types
• Determine how the blastwave evolves and interacts with the surroundings
• Use gamma-ray bursts to study the early universe
• Perform the first sensitive hard X-ray survey of the sky