much smaller than a big solar flare.

This is totally new, totally unexpected. This is the type of unscripted event in our nearby universe that we hoped Swift could catch.

We designed Swift to look for faint bursts coming from the edge of the universe. Now we’ve got one, and it’s fascinating. For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the...

It was really exciting news for the Swift team when this Swift data were sent to the ground. This is exactly what we had built Swift to detect.

For the first time we can learn about individual stars from near the beginning of time. There are surely many more out there.

much further back than this.

Gamma-ray bursts in general are notoriously difficult to study, but the shortest ones have been next to impossible to pin down,

This is totally new, totally unexpected.

The gamma rays hit the ionosphere and created more ionization, briefly expanding the ionosphere,