Astronomers are captivated by brightest flash ever seen
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Loading... - Sabrina Jabal
- 18 Oct 2022
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The burst of gamma-rays -- the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation -- was first detected by orbiting telescopes on October 9, and its afterglow is still being watched by scientists across the world.
Astrophysicist Brendan O'Connor told AFP that gamma-ray bursts that last hundreds of seconds, as occurred on Sunday, are thought to be caused by dying massive stars, greater than 30 times bigger than our Sun.
The star explodes in a supernova, collapses into a black hole, then matter forms in a disk around the black hole, falls inside, and is spewed out in a jet of energy that travels at 99.99 percent the speed of light.
The flash released photons carrying a record 18 teraelectronvolts of energy -- that's 18 with 12 zeros behind it -- and it has impacted long wave radio communications in Earth's ionosphere.
"It's really breaking records, both in the amount of photons, and the energy of the photons that are reaching us," said O'Connor, who used infrared instruments on the Gemini South telescope in Chile to take fresh observations early Friday.
"Something this bright, this nearby, is really a once-in-a-century event," he added.
"Gamma-ray bursts in general release the same amount of energy that our Sun produces over its entire lifetime in the span of a few seconds -- and this event is the brightest gamma ray burst."
The gamma-ray burst, known as GRB 221009A, was first spotted by telescopes including NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and Wind spacecraft on Sunday morning Eastern time. Read More...
