IN THE first month of the new millennium, astronomers witnessed the most
distant explosion ever seen from Earth. At a conference in Rome last week, they
predicted that mighty gamma-ray bursts, like the one on 31 January, might reveal
secrets from the far-flung corners of the early Universe.
“It’s absolutely thrilling,” says astronomer Ralph Wijers of the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, who attended the Second Workshop on
Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Afterglow Era. “We’ve been speculating for a while that
the bursts are the brightest things in the Universe, and we’ll see them as far
away…
