Via Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, comes news that yesterday there was a massive gamma ray burst bigger than any astronomical event ever seen by human beings. The event was so massive that it was visible to the unaided human eye, even though the burst was 7.5 billion light years away. For those of you who aren’t fundamentalist Christians, that means that the explosion actually took place 7.5 billion YEARS ago, before the Earth was even formed. (For those of you who are fundamentalist Christians, GFY) Ordinarily, the most distant object visible to the naked eye is a galaxy 2.9 billion light years away.

The afterglow of the burst (which is what you see in the picture above), was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever detected in recorded history. If you had been standing outside in the dark, in a place without much light pollution, this burst would have been just barely visible if you knew where to look. Most astronomers were able to pick it up on radio telescopes, not optical ones.

To give you a sense of how massive that explosion would have been, Phil Plait says:

Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.

The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.

In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.

Wow. Just wow.