A NASA astronomer has spotted one of the most powerful nuclear explosions
ever seen in the Universe. Tod Strohmayer from the Goddard Spaceflight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland, was watching a distant neutron star with the Rossi X-ray
Timing Explorer when the star suddenly erupted. The explosion lasted for three
hours and released more energy than all the world’s population would consume in
a hundred billion years.
The neutron star, called 4U 1820-30, is 20,000 light years away in the
constellation Sagittarius. It’s part of a binary system and the two stars take
only 11 minutes to orbit each other—the…
