Comparative Reality

Please take a break from making the universe seem bigger and cooler than it already is. It's getting tough to keep up.

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Swift satellite has found the most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected. The blast, designated GRB 080913, arose from an exploding star 12.8 billion light-years away.
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Because light moves at finite speed, looking farther into the universe means looking back in time. GRB 080913's "lookback time" reveals that the burst occurred less than 825 million years after the universe began.

The Bad Astronomer waxes poetic:

The star probably only lived a few scant million years before detonating, catastrophically tearing itself to shreds at the end of its life, and releasing as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will over its entire 10 billion year lifetime. For a few seconds the dying star was the single brightest object in the Universe, but over the intervening eons as its roar traveled across the cosmos it faded to whisper, eroded by its travel, literally fighting against the expansion of space itself.

Swift was launched just under four years ago. Looking through the project's featured articles is not for the faint of heart: "Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite have spotted a stellar flare on a nearby star so powerful that, had it been from our sun, it would have triggered a mass extinction on Earth."

Time to build those colony ships.