I believe the burst itself was detected by a widefield sensor on the Swift telescope, which then repositioned itself automatically and was able to catch the afterglow within 50 seconds of the burst. This is the first time a visible-light afterglow from a short-duration burst has been detected (not to mention photographed). There's still a lot of uncertainty about whether the short-duration bursts represent black hole formation events or not.

 

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050509_blackhole_birth.html

That is crazy!, wow, we can learn so much if it is an actual black hole forming, this is awesome!

Awesome!

Let's send an astronaught (sp?) up there and test if those black hole theories that you'd stretch and never reach the singularity inside are true

Dear Folks:

 

Maybe next time the source will be closer than 3 billion light years away and we will get solid confirmation.

 

Erich

 

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050509/full/050509-4.html