A star in Boötes was observed exploding last night. An event in itself, but this star is 7.5 billion light years away, and considering it was visible from earth with the naked eye, this makes it the furthest object ever to have been observed by humankind without optical instruments. Truely amazing. As NASA points out, this explosion happened before the Earth existed, by a whole 3 billion years or so.
It was quite clear last night, should have looked in the right direction, but the nature of these happenings are of course, almost entirely unpredictable. It really does come down to right place, right time, right direction.
Generally speaking, the furthest object you can realiably see with the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy, but thats only 2.5 million light years away, and at a magnitude of 4.4 (Human visibility goes to a maximum of 6, the brighest star in the Sky-Sirius- is -1.47, a full moon -13 and the Sun -26) is easily visible in the Northern Hemisphere. Last nights explosion would have been at least 6, although it was only visible for 30 seconds.
Naturally, this calls for another astronomy picture of my own:
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