Scientists have discovered a “completely unprecedented” surge of energy in space

Scientists have discovered an “unprecedented” burst of energy in space known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB), appearing brighter at some wavelengths than any previously observed event of this type.

Gamma-ray bursts are enormous flares fueled by intense cosmic phenomena such as the deaths of giant stars, and they produce some of the brightest spectacles in the universe. News of this particular burst began to spread on social media after it was spotted by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neil Gehrel’s Swift Observatory, both NASA missions, on Sunday, with some astronomers dubbing it “an extraordinary event‘ and possibly ‘the brightest GRB ever.”

Phil Evans, an astronomer at the University of Leicester who works on Swift’s X-ray telescope, colorfully described the outburst, known as GRB 221009A, as “dumb, really bright” in a tweet on Monday.

In an email to Motherboard, Evans stressed that the discovery is so fresh that it will take a while to unravel its meaning, but he noted that the burst “is clearly the brightest GRB we’ve seen on X-rays , at least by the time after the first explosion that we observed it.”

“The new GRB 221009A is about 1,000 times brighter than the typical GRB and a few hundred times brighter than the brightest seen before – but that’s only for X-rays,” Evans said. “For gamma rays, it’s one of the brightest seen (as reported by the Fermi telescope team).”

Marcos Santander, an astronomer at the University of Alabama, noted in an email that the Fermi satellite’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) was the first to spot the event and immediately marked it as extraordinary.

“GBM is the most productive GRB detector, detecting on average one GRB approximately every day. Since Fermi’s launch in 2008, it has collected thousands of GRBs over more than 14 years of operation,” Santander told Motherboard. “Of those thousands, that on October 9th was by far the brightest” – so bright, in fact, that it “blinded the instruments for a while, considering how many gamma rays were arriving in a very short time.”

“GRBs are also the most luminous events in the universe,” he continued. “This could have an intrinsic magnitude 10^22 times that of the Sun, or about trillions of times the total energy output of all the stars in the Milky Way combined over the short period that the GRB was on, if I have the numbers.” To the right.”

The cosmic light show likely marks the energetic death of a massive star and its subsequent transformation into a black hole. It’s unprecedented at some wavelengths, in part because it occurred about two billion light-years from Earth. That’s a huge distance objectively, but relatively close for a GRB.

“Obviously keep in mind that this event is very new and it will be some time before we have a full picture, so this is a bit preliminary,” Evans said. “However… it seems to be a ‘long GRB’ and these are pretty well understood. What happens is that a very massive, rapidly rotating star reaches the point where its nuclear reactions can no longer generate enough energy to support the star’s weight. The center of it collapses and forms a new black hole, and that releases a lot of energy.”

“This causes some of the material that makes up the star to be fired off the star’s top and bottom in narrow ‘jets’ — jets of material traveling at almost the speed of light,” he continued. “When one of these jets is aimed at Earth, we see the GRB. So that’s what happened here. Why this one is so bright compared to others isn’t clear yet,” although “part of it is just that it’s nearby.”

Swift, who has been in orbit around Earth since 2004, missed GRB 221009A’s first outburst because our planet blocked that part of the sky. But the observatory’s Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) captured the brilliant aftermath of the blast almost an hour later as its aftermath became visible.

“This is completely unprecedented – the explosion itself only lasted about 5 minutes (which is fairly typical for a GRB), but GRB explosions are followed by an ‘afterglow’ that usually fades fairly quickly,” Evans said. “We’ve never had a GRB where the afterglow was so bright that it triggered BAT.”

The GRB did not appear very bright at optical wavelengths, but this may be due to its position in the sky and a lack of direct observations with optical instruments.

“Because of the location of this GRB, we have to look straight through the disk of our galaxy to see it,” Evans said. “This disc absorbs *a lot* of the optical light, so it would have been a lot brighter if it was in a ‘better’ piece of sky.”

“The other thing is that, as far as I can tell, nobody observed it with an optical telescope until Swift spotted it, so 55 minutes after the GRB (that’s because Fermi didn’t have very good positions from where a GRB is; Swift does). Personally, if people had watched it when it first happened, I wouldn’t be surprised if it broke all optical records… But since they didn’t, we can’t say it did.”

Given its impressive luminosity and intriguing possible origin, Evans and many other scientists will be keeping an eye on GRB 221009A’s evolution as it transitions into lower-energy light forms.

“I think the first step is to put together all the data collected from all the instruments that observed the eruption and start looking into the details of how this event actually happened,” Santander said. “These are ultimately the most energetic explosions in the universe, so you want to understand what type of object could produce such an event, what is driving this extreme emission, what types of particles are being accelerated, and so on.”

“Not only that, because these GRBs are so distant they can be used as a probe to study the properties of the space in between, from the amount of light left over from previous generations of stars to studying dust clouds in ours.” galaxy and even basic physics tests,” he added. “There will be many papers on this outbreak, the first step is to gather all the information, and different observatories offer different perspectives, so there will be more information as analyzes are conducted and published.”

All of this new research will help explain why the birth of this distant black hole produced such dazzling cosmic fireworks, a question that may open a window into the most energetic phenomena in the cosmos.

“The key science here is that we’re looking at really extreme physics — very strong gravity, large masses moving at very high speeds while being extremely hot — conditions that you can never create in a lab, so only we can understand by studying extreme astronomical objects like GRBs,” Evans concluded. “A lot of the open questions are pretty detailed physics (and I don’t pretend to understand them all!), specifically about what’s going on in these jets – how particles accelerate, interact, radiate energy, and so on. And because this event is so bright, it really makes for a great data set to study this physics with.”