The brightest gamma-ray burst on record is forcing scientists around the world to scramble to collect and analyze data from what’s been called a “once in a lifetime” event.
The burst, known as GRB 221009A but dubbed the “BOAT” (Brightest Of All Time), was first detected on October 9, but astronomers are still buzzing nearly a month later.
The gamma-ray burst originates from the direction of the constellation Sagitta and could signal the birth of a new black hole formed like a massive star collapsing under its own weight, according to NASA.
One of the reasons the burst was so much brighter than any on record is the (relative) proximity to Earth, just two billion light-years away, which is close for a gamma-ray burst.
The burst was so powerful that it even appears to have disrupted Earth’s ionosphere, affecting long-wave radio transmissions.
The black hole drives powerful jets of particles that shoot through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays as they propagate through space. (Credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz de Wilde)
All eyes on Sagitta
After NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Wind spacecraft first detected the explosion, telescopes around the world were rotated to further study this phenomenon. extraordinary.
China’s Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) found that the most energetic light particles detected in the burst reached 18 tera-electron-volts (TeV), the observatory’s chief scientist Cao Zhen , calling the find “totally unexpected and extraordinary,” according to the South China Morning Post.
The recorded energy is four times greater than the previous record energy level and greater than the highest energies attainable by the Large Hadron Collider.
The Baksan Neutrino Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences Nuclear Research Institute also reported that it had detected a photon with an energy of 251 TeV from the burst.
A photon with either of these energy levels should have been lost on its way to Earth, but somehow it wasn’t.
BOAT could provide insight into dark matter
There are a few theories as to how the energetic particle formed here, one being that it was converted into an “axion-like particle”.
Axions are light particles that could make up dark matter, the stuff thought to make up the majority of the universe. Particles could also explain a problematic property of quarks.
An axion-like particle may have been made from a high-energy photo affected by the strong magnetic fields around the imploding star that caused the gamma-ray burst, according to Quantum magazine. The particle would then have been converted back into a photon during its interaction with the magnetic fields of our galaxy.
However, physicists are still skeptical because there could be other explanations for the detection of the photon, such as it coming from a separate incident that coincides with the burst.
If the photon can be linked to the BOAT, “it would most likely be evidence for new physics and potentially dark matter,” Milena Crnogorčević, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, told Quantum.
Scientists are also waiting to collect data on the supernova that appears to have caused the gamma-ray burst, with signals believed to come from a supernova typically appearing 14 to 20 days after a burst, according to WIRED.
The power of the gamma-ray burst was both a blessing and a curse, as it provided scientists with plenty of data but also overloaded their equipment.
“There were so many photons per second that they couldn’t keep up,” said Andrew Levan, an astrophysicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, for Quantum.
“Our instruments are very sensitive and they are intended to detect faint sources,” Judith Racusin, assistant project scientist for the Fermi Space Telescope, told WIRED, pointing out that the large amount of photons recorded had become “blurred”.
“So instead of detecting the energy of each individual gamma ray, we detect the sum of the energy of those gamma rays,” Racusin said.
University of Maryland and George Washington University astronomer Brendan O’Connor is excited about the possibilities of this gamma-ray burst, telling Inverse that “because this burst is so bright and so close, we believe this is a unique opportunity to address some of the most fundamental questions about these explosions, from the formation of black holes to testing models of dark matter.
Sorting through all the data collected over the past few weeks and in the future on the BOAT will take months, if not years. “Even 10 years from now, there will be a new understanding of this dataset,” Eric Burns, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University, told Quanta. “It still hasn’t quite struck me that it actually happened.”
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