The optical afterglow of the burst reached anapparent magnitude of 18.7, making the Beethoven Burst one of the brightest bursts ever detected, even though it occurred about 10 billionlight years from Earth.[1] Frank Marshall, aNASA astrophysicist at theGoddard Space Flight Center, commented that "this was by far the brightest burst we have detected in a long time."[3] The burst's peakflux ranked it as the second most powerful burst that theBurst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) had ever detected.[4] The analysis of the observations strengthened the theory that gamma-ray bursts are a result of ahypernova,[5] though other possibleprogenitors exist, such as the merger of twoblack holes.
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