They discovered the brightest gamma-ray burst ever

The ‘brightest ever’ gamma ray burst (GRB) This is what astronomers called it. They occurred 2,000 million light-years from Earth and studying them could be crucial in understanding the details of these phenomena.

The intense pulses of gamma rays, which were discovered on October 9 of last year, swept through our solar system, and astronomers tracked this phenomenon with the most powerful telescopes in the world to study it. Some results have been published today Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The outbreak is listed as GRB 221009A It’s really unusual, because statistically it’s only expected to happen once in several thousand years, “it might even be the brightest gamma-ray burst since the beginning of human civilization,” according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

Data from this rare event could become crucial in understanding the details of the massive explosions that generate gamma-ray bursts.

X-rays from the blast 20 dust clouds lit up in our galaxyallowing you to determine your distances and characteristics more accurately than ever before.

However, a mystery remains as the debris from the stellar explosion that caused the gamma ray burst appears to have disappeared without a trace.

he Swift Neil Grylls Observatory affiliate a pot He was the first to discover X, and the source appears to be located in the Milky Way, not far from the center of the galaxy.

However, observations from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) place it in a galaxy much more distant than our own and about 2 million light-years away, so it should have been exceptionally bright.

“The difference between a typical gamma-ray burst and this is about the same as between a light bulb in your living room and the bright floodlights in a sports stadium,” he explained. Andrew Levan from Radbound University in the Netherlands, who used the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes to observe it.

For ESA researcher GRB specialist Alicia Rouco “It was a very revealing event. We were very lucky to witness it.”

Radiation emission from the GRB It lasted more than 300 seconds And astronomers believe that such phenomena, when “long-lived” like this one, may be the “birth cry” of a black hole, which forms when the core of a massive, rapidly spinning star collapses under its own weight.

The newborn black hole emits powerful jets of plasma at a speed close to the speed of light, which pass through the collapsing star and shine with gamma rays, explains the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA).

Calculations show that during those seconds, the explosion precipitated one gigawatt of energy in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, It is equivalent to that produced by a ground-based power station emitting a lot of gamma rays and x-rays which excite the Earth’s ionosphere,” highlights Eric Kolkers, integrated project scientist at the European Space Agency.

The event was so bright that the remaining radiation until today is known as Glow, still visible The disease will last for “years”, says Volodymyr Savchenko, a scientist at the University of Geneva, which will allow further study of the outbreak.

The vast amount of data collected by a variety of instruments is being brought together to understand how the original explosion occurred and how the radiation interacted with other matter on its journey through space.

One area that has already yielded scientific results is the way X-rays illuminate the dust clouds in our galaxy.

The radiation traveled through intergalactic space for about two billion years before entering our galaxy. He found the first dust cloud about 60,000 years ago and the last about 1,000 years ago.

(with information from EFE)

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