The astounding outburst came from a galaxy 2 billion light-years away. It's the 'BOAT'—the brightest of all time.
When you think of violent explosions, your mind may go to nuclear weapons or the brilliant supernovae that mark the deaths of stars. But the biggest explosions in the universe are gamma ray bursts, which are thought to occur when massive stars collide or die and give way to black holes.
There are long- and short-duration gamma ray bursts; long bursts are any that are detected for more than two seconds. Short events are more often associated with star mergers and black hole formation,The gamma ray burst and its shells, as seen by the Swift Observatory.Stellar deaths sometimes give rise to massive, hyper-energetic jets of material, akin to those that
. When those jets are pointed directly at Earth—as the recent burst was—it makes the gamma rays particularly bright from our perspective.Gamma ray bursts are fleeting and can originate at any point in the sky, making it much easier for astronomers to observe their afterglow than their initial, brilliant outburst. The follow-up radio observations of the recent burst were made with the CSIRO ASKAP telescope in Western Australia.
For weeks after the initial flash, X-ray light scattered off dust in the Milky Way on its way to us. That resulted in the appearance of several dust rings expanding outward from the direction of the burst. The nearest ring is about 1,300 light-years away, and the most distant is about 61,000 light-years away, on the other side of the Milky Way.The researchers also took precise measurements of the burst’s reverse shock, or the wave of material that moves backward, toward the origin of the burst.
“Our observations provide unmatched insights into the reverse shock model for gamma-ray burst emission, showing it is very difficult for existing models to replicate the slow evolution of the energy peaks that we observed,” said James Leung, an astronomer at the University of Sydney and a co-author of a, in the University of Sydney release. “This means we have to refine and develop new theoretical models to understand these most extreme explosions in the Universe.
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