Robotic telescopes capture 'burst of the century'

Intelligent telescopes designed to scan the skies for optical anomalies got a front row seat recently for the birth of a black hole, U.S. astrophysicists say. The Rapid Telescopes for Optical Response system, or RAPTOR, is a network of small robotic observatories designed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory that surveys the skies for optical signs such as flashes emanating from a star in its death throes as it collapses and becomes a black hole. "Los Alamos' RAPTOR telescopes in New Mexico and Hawaii received a very bright cosmic birth announcement for a black hole on April 27," said astrophysicist Tom Vestrand, lead author of a paper appearing Thursday in the journal Science reporting the event. "This was the burst of the century," Los Alamos co-author James Wren said. "It's the biggest, brightest one to happen in at least 20 years, and maybe even longer than that." The burst appeared in the constellation Leo in the form of an exceptionally bright flash of visible light and powerful burst of cosmic gamma-ray emissions, the researchers said. "This was a Rosetta-Stone event that illuminates so many things -- literally," Vestrand said, noting the transformation of the star into a black hole yielded a lingering "afterglow" that faded in lock-step with the highest energy gamma-rays. "We had all the assets in place to collect a very detailed data set. These are data that astrophysicists will be looking at for a long time to come because we have a detailed record of the event as it unfolded," he said.