Mysterious Signs and Wonders: ‘Monstrous’ Gamma-ray Burst Brightest Seen Since ‘Human Civilization Began’, Pointed Directly at Earth
A gamma-ray burst, which lit up our galaxy last October, was the “brightest burst” ever seen and a once-in-10,000-year explosion, according to NASA.
Astronomers have been studying the extragalactic burst, nicknamed BOAT for the “brightest of all time,” for months after it triggered detectors on numerous spacecraft. NASA revealed astronomers’ conclusions Wednesday, calling the Oct. 9 blast the brightest since the start of mankind.
“It is just an absolutely monstrous burst. It is extremely extraordinary; we’ve never seen anything remotely close to it,” Eric Burns, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University, told reporters at the 20th meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division in Hawaii.
“The BOAT is a once-in-10,000-year event,” Burns added. “So, there’s a reasonable chance this is the brightest gamma-ray burst to hit Earth since human civilization began.”
While the burst — known as GRB 221009A — was so bright it blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, scientists were able to reconstruct the information from data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The results were confirmed with data and analysis from Russian and Chinese teams. Together, they concluded that the burst was 70 times brighter than any others seen.
(Read more from “Signs And Wonder: ‘Monstrous’ Gamma-ray Burst Brightest Seen Since ‘Human Civilization Began'” HERE)
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Mysterious Gamma Ray Burst Puzzles Astronomers
By JENNIFER OUELLETTE. [W]e now have new data from follow-up observations in several new papers published in a special focus issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The findings confirmed that GRB 221009A was indeed the BOAT (“brightest of all time”), appearing especially bright because its narrow jet was pointing directly at Earth. “It’s probably the brightest event to hit Earth since human civilization began,” Eric Burns, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, told New Scientist. “The energy of this thing is so extreme that if you took the entire sun and you converted all of it into pure energy, it still wouldn’t match this event. There’s just nothing comparable.”
But the various analyses also yielded several surprising results that puzzle astronomers and may lead to a significant overhaul of our current models of gamma-ray bursts. For instance, a supernova should have occurred a few weeks after the initial burst, but astronomers have yet to detect one. Radio data from observations of the afterglow didn’t match predictions of existing models, and astronomers detected rare extended rings of X-ray light echoes from the initial blast in distant dust clouds. (Read more about the gamma-ray burst HERE)
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