![]() Perhaps the most consequential observation happened in China. The two factors combined to make this the kind of event that occurs only once every few hundred years. It’s also likely that the BOAT’s powerful jet was pointed toward us. First, it occurred about 2.4 billion light-years from Earth - fairly close for gamma-ray bursts (though well outside of our galaxy). ![]() The initial analysis suggests that there are two reasons why the BOAT was so bright. “It still hasn’t quite hit me that this really happened.” “Even 10 years from now there’ll be new understanding from this data set,” said Eric Burns, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University. “The fact you can change Earth’s ionosphere from an object halfway across the universe is pretty incredible,” said Doug Welch, an astronomer at McMaster University in Canada.Īstronomers cheekily called it the BOAT - “brightest of all time” - and began to squeeze it for information about gamma-ray bursts and the cosmos more generally. The burst even appears to have caused Earth’s ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, to swell in size for several hours. “There were so many photons per second that they couldn’t keep up,” said Andrew Levan, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. ![]() This particular burst was so bright that it oversaturated the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an orbiting NASA telescope designed in part to observe such events. The explosion was a long gamma-ray burst, a cosmic event where a massive dying star unleashes powerful jets of energy as it collapses into a black hole or neutron star. “I landed, looked at my phone, and had dozens of messages,” said Racusin, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. ![]() On Sunday, October 9, Judith Racusin was 35,000 feet in the air, en route to a high-energy astrophysics conference, when the biggest cosmic explosion in history took place. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |