NASA Telescopes have detected the brightest, highest-energy floods radiation from space absolutely registered.
About 1.9 billion years ago, a dying star collapsed and exploded in a powerful wave of gamma rays that shot towards Earth. Eventually, they wiped out our planet on October 9th. They called the detectors on three orbiting telescopes: the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, Neil Gehrell’s Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft.
These telescopes and other observatories around the world quickly settled on the source of the radiation: a distant object now called GRB 221009A, pulsing with the powerful glow of gamma-ray emissions.
It was the brightest and most powerful event ever detected, NASA to announce Thursday. The images from the telescope show how dangerous the explosion was.
“In our research group, we refer to this explosion as the ‘BOAT’, or the brightest ever, because when you look at the thousands of explosions that gamma-ray telescopes have detected since the 1990s, this telescope stands out. “Gillian Rastingad, a doctoral student at Northwestern University, said in a declaration.
Rastingad led a group of researchers who made follow-up observations on Friday and took multiple measurements as the stream of gamma rays continued to flow towards Earth.
The radiation could come from a supernova explosion – the collapse of a dying star into a black hole. It could be decades before another gamma-ray burst reappears.
“It’s a truly unique event,” said Yvette Sindis, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. chewableadding that a giant gamma-ray burst in a galaxy very close to us is “extremely, incredibly rare”.
“It’s the equivalent of getting front row seats at a fireworks display,” he said.
The sheer power and luminosity of the ancient explosion allows astronomers to collect a lot of data about it, which could reveal new insights into how stars die, how black holes form, and how matter behaves at speeds close to light. to how it emerges from a Super Nova. . It helps that the object is relatively close to us, compared to other gamma-ray bursts discovered by astronomers.
This proximity “allows us to uncover many details that would be too faint to see,” said Roberta Pellera, a member of the Fermi LAT Collaborative who led the first communications on the explosion to NASA. declaration. “But it’s also among the brightest and most energetic explosions ever, regardless of distance, which makes it doubly exciting.”
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