Astronomers were stunned by the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded

On October 9, 2022, a gamma-ray burst brighter than any previous burst has passed through Earth and space detectors. A team scrambled to take follow-up observations at radio wavelengths, and confirmed that the explosion was about 70 times brighter than anything previously recorded.

The astronomical team believes that the explosion of 2022 –It was reported by Gizmodo at the timeIt was one event in 10,000 years. New research details aspects of the blast published Today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

While the eruption (its official name is GRB 221009A) is probably not the brightest never It’s happening, “likely the brightest explosion of X-ray and gamma-ray energies to occur since the beginning of human civilization,” Louisiana State University astrophysicist Eric Burns, a co-author of the study, said in a statement from the University of Sydney. . This earned her the nickname BOAT, or “The Brightest of All Time”.

The University of Sydney version notes that the explosion was so bright that most gamma-ray instruments in space could not measure its true intensity; They were literally blinded by the light.

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When you think of violent explosions, your mind may turn to nuclear weapons or gorgeous supernovae that signal the death of stars. But the biggest explosions in the universe are gamma ray bursts, which are thought to happen when massive stars collide or die and give way to black holes.

There are long and short duration gamma ray bursts; Long bursts are any detected bursts of more than 2 seconds. Short events are often associated with the processes of star mergers and the formation of black holes. According to NASAwhile longer bursts are associated with stellar death.

Stellar deaths sometimes result in huge jets of highly energetic material, similar to those out there emanated from pulsars. When these jets are directed directly at Earth – as was the recent explosion – it makes the gamma rays especially bright from our perspective.

GRBs are ephemeral and can originate at any point in the sky, making it easier for astronomers to observe their afterglow than their brilliant initial burst. Subsequent radio observations of the latest eruption were made using the CSIRO ASKAP telescope in Western Australia. (the The ASKAP telescope has detected a strange-looking radio signal from the center of the galaxy again in 2021.)

For weeks after the initial flash, X-ray light has been scattering dust in the Milky Way on its way to us. This resulted in the appearance of several dust rings expanding outwards from the direction of the explosion. The nearest ring is about 1,300 light-years away, and the farthest is about 61,000 light-years away, on the far side of the Milky Way.

The researchers also took precise measurements of the explosion’s reverse shockwave, or the wave of matter moving backwards, toward the origin of the explosion.

James Leung, an astronomer at the University of Sydney and co-author of A complementary Stady It is currently hosted on arXiv, in the University of Sydney edition. “This means that we have to improve and develop new theoretical models to understand these most dangerous explosions in the universe.”

Gamma rays could soon be used to detect gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time caused by massive events like black hole mergers. Gravitational waves subtly alter the amount of time it takes for light to reach us from distant sources, subtleties that are currently being detected with observatories such as LIGO and Virgo interferometers.

The higher goal is to pin down the gravitational wave background – you can think of it as complete circumference of gravitational waves, intersect dynamically as they result from the collision of the black hole and neutron star throughout the universe. Some researchers hope so Gamma ray sources can be harnessed to create a timing matrixsimilar to existing pulsar timing arrays.

More: Astronomers have detected gravitational waves. Now they want to see the cosmic ocean