Astronomers recorded the brightest flash of light ever, an 18,000,000,000-volt burst from the event that occurred 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, and experts believe the flash was most likely caused by the formation of a black hole and a gamma-ray burst. An outburst, the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation, was first detected by telescopes in orbit on October 9, and scientists around the world are still monitoring its afterglow.
According to the British newspaper, “Daily Mail”, Brendan O’Connor, who used the infrared instruments at the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, “is really a record-breaker in terms of the number of photons and the energy of the photons that reach us,” and he added, “Something like that, this Close, actually once. …the event of the century”.
O’Connor told AFP that the gamma-ray bursts, which last for hundreds of seconds, are thought to be caused by the extinction of massive stars 30 times the size of our sun.
The star explodes and collapses into a black hole, then material forms in a disk around the black hole, falls into it and is released in a stream of energy traveling at 99.99% of the speed of light.
The flash released photons carrying an energy of 18 tera-eats, 18 with 12 zeros in a row, and affected long-wave radio communications in the Earth’s ionosphere.
Gamma ray research first began in the 1960s when American satellites were designed to detect if the Soviet Union was detonating bombs in space, and such explosions were eventually detected outside the Milky Way.