Did you see the light? Last week, the brightest light ever to appear to the naked eye finally made its way to earth--only it was faint and not bright when it arrived. The luminescence resulted from an exploding star 7.5 billion light years away. The distance is astounding; the distance in time, even more so. What people saw from earth last week was an event that predated the earth. The explosion happened 7.5 billion years ago. Earthlings just got a chance to see it now because it takes a lot of time for light to travel halfway across the known universe. To put the distance in perspective, the light you see from the sun takes about eight minutes to reach your eye. The sun is 93 million miles away. I won't begin to calculate how far away a star was whose light took 7.5 billion years to get here. I say "was" because, although it only now presented to us evidence of its existence, that star certainly ceased to exist when it blazed so brilliantly. The gamma-ray burst was so intense that many of the objects launched into space by it travelled at nearly the speed of light. "If someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time," NASA's Stephen Holland noted, "they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid."

93,000,000/8 = 11,625,000 miles per minute.

A year contains 525,949 minutes, rounding up.

11,625,000 * 525,949 = 6114157125000 miles in a year.

6114157125000 * 7.5bill = 4.58561784 x 10^22 miles away.

Right?

Sitting around at 4:30 am waiting for the Sox season opener leads to activities like this.

So how do you think this will affect Global Warming? Sounds like probably disasterous consequences for the polar bears.

YOU, my friend, are a true sports fan!

J.D. Drew who?

Theres more than one Moss in this town.