Where were you on June 21st?

On June 21st, if you were standing in the vicinity of NASA's SWIFT satellite (or anywhere else in the vacuum of space near Earth), this is what you might have looked like, briefly:




That's because SWIFT observed a super-blast of gamma-rays.

Although the Swift satellite was designed specifically to study gamma-ray bursts, the instrument was not designed to handle an X-ray blast this bright. "The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented" said Neil Gehrels, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He said the burst, named GRB 100621A, is the brightest X-ray source that Swift has detected since the observatory began X-ray observation in early 2005. "Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that gamma-ray bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be," Gehrels said.

Record-Breaking X-Ray Blast Briefly Blinds Space Observatory

So what caused it? Collision of black holes? I guess the prevailing theory is black hole merging with a neutron star.