WASHINGTON (AFP) – Astronomers have observed the brightest flash of light ever seen, from an event that took place 2.4 billion light-years from Earth and likely triggered by the formation of a black hole.
The burst of gamma rays – the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation – was first spotted by orbiting telescopes on October 9, and its afterglow is still being observed by scientists around the world.
Astrophysicist Brendan O’Connor told AFP that gamma-ray bursts lasting hundreds of seconds like the ones that occurred on Sunday are believed to be caused by dying massive stars more than 30 times larger than our Sun.
The star explodes in a supernova, collapsing into a black hole, then matter forms in a disk around the black hole, falls into it, and is spewed out in a jet of energy traveling at 99.99 percent the speed of light.
The flash released photons with a record energy of 18 teraelectronvolts – that’s 18 followed by 12 zeros – and it has affected long-wavelength radio communications in Earth’s ionosphere.
“It’s really breaking records, both in terms of the amount of photons and the energy of the photons that are reaching us,” said O’Connor, who used infrared instruments at the Gemini South telescope in Chile to make new observations early Friday make.
Scientists unveiled the first picture ever taken of a black hole after collating data collected by a network of radio telescopes around the world. The image was released by the Event Horizon Telescope on April 10, 2019. (Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/Maunakea Observatories via AP)
“Something so bright, so close, is really a once-in-a-lifetime event,” he added.
Gamma-ray research first began in the 1960s, when US satellites designed to determine whether the Soviet Union was detonating bombs in space ended up finding such bursts originating from outside the Milky Way.
“Gamma-ray bursts generally release within a few seconds the same amount of energy that our Sun produces throughout its lifetime — and this event is the brightest gamma-ray burst,” O’Connor said.
This gamma-ray burst, known as GRB 221009A, was first spotted Sunday morning EST by telescopes including NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Neil Gehrel’s Swift Observatory and the Wind spacecraft.
1.9 billion year old film
It originated from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation and traveled an estimated 1.9 billion years to reach Earth – less than the current distance from its starting point as the universe expands.
Observing the event now is like watching a 1.9 billion-year-old record of these events unfold before us, giving astronomers a rare opportunity to gain new insights into things like black hole formation.
“That’s what makes this kind of science so addictive — you get this adrenaline rush when something like that happens,” said O’Connor, a fellow at the University of Maryland and George Washington University.
In the coming weeks, he and others will continue to look for supernova signatures at optical and infrared wavelengths to confirm that their hypothesis about the origins of the flash is correct and that the event conforms to known physics.
Unfortunately, although the initial outburst may have been visible to amateur astronomers, it has since disappeared from view.
This image, provided by the European Space Agency, shows thousands of galaxies recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope in observations from 2002 to 2009 (NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz ) , R. Bouwens (Leiden University) and the HUDF09 team via AP)
Supernova explosions are also predicted to be responsible for the production of heavy elements – like gold, platinum, uranium – and astronomers will also be on the lookout for their signatures.
Astrophysicists have written in the past that the sheer power of gamma-ray bursts could cause extinction-level events here on Earth.
But O’Connor cautioned that this scenario isn’t something we should worry too much about, as the energy beams are very tightly focused and unlikely to originate in our galaxy.
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