I don’t normally delve into everyday observations in science because, frankly, I’m not really qualified to comment on them, but this one is just too spectacular. Phil Plait wrote this morning about a gamma ray burster (GRB) that went off yesterday that was so bright that, had you been looking in the right direction when it happened, you would have seen it flare into existence with your naked eye. GRBs are usually extremely large stars that explode in violent supernovas when they die, and, due to a special bit of physics, as the core collapses into a black hole and the outer shell expands rapidly outward, they give off immense amounts of energy and often outshine entire galaxies for a brief period of time. Here is a link to an animation of a few still photos of it that show it bursting into existence. This particular one was 7.5 billion light years away and has an apparent magnitude of +5.6, which means that because of the extreme distance, it has an absolute magnitude of -36.2. To put that in perspective, the Milky Way, our own galaxy, has an absolute magnitude of -20.5 (lower values mean brighter). Because the magnitude scale is logarithmic, this means that the GRB was over a million times brighter than our entire galaxy. (thanks to a commenter at Bad Astronomy for those numbers) If these incredible monsters, spewing incomprehensible amounts of energy out into space, don’t put us in our place and make us realize how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of the universe, I’m afraid nothing will.

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