Astronomers overnight got a glimpse of what is beginning to look like the brightest gamma ray burst ever witnessed.

The folks up at Los Alamos who use special automated telescopes to track GRB's gave me a rundown late this afternoon of what they're calling "GRB 080319B", which is likely to go down in the history books.

If you had been in a dark spot and known where to look, you likely could have seen the flash with the naked eye, LANL astronomer Tom Vestrand told me. These things are halfway across the universe, so we're talking here about an extraordinary blast.

GRB's seem to happen when a star collapses, emitting an enormous blast of energy as it collapses into a black hole. The problem is knowing where to look in the moments after the flash goes off. The characteristic flash of gamma rays don't penetrate Earth's atmosphere, so satellites like NASA's Swift act as astronomers' sentries. They detect the gamma rays and tell astronomers on Earth where to point their telescopes to seen the afterglow of visible light as the ember cools.

The question, via Vestrand, posed by the early morning blast today: "How do these guys get so bright?"

We'll likely here more about  080319B.

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