Detection of the brightest explosion ever of gamma rays in space
Recently, astronomers spotted the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded for a distant galaxy — it was dubbed BOAT, which they described as the brightest of all time.
Gamma ray bursts are energetic explosions that explode when a massive star dies and leaves behind a black hole, or neutron star (SN: 11/20/19; SN: 8/2/21), releasing jets of gamma rays away from the star’s poles. Previously, if those jets were aimed directly at Earth, astronomers could see them as a gamma-ray burst.
The researchers announced that this new explosion, officially called GRB 221009A, was likely caused by a supernova that gave birth to a black hole in a galaxy about 2 billion light-years away from Earth. All of its mass into pure energy.
NASA’s Neil Geirels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope in space, automatically detected the explosion on October 9 around 10:15 a.m. EDT and immediately alerted astronomers that something strange was happening.
“At the time, when it exploded, it just seemed kind of weird to us,” says Penn State astrophysicist Jimmy Kenya, head of science operations at Swift.
The location of the explosion in the sky appears to be in line with the plane of the Milky Way, so Kenya and his colleagues initially thought that it was inside our galaxy, and it is unlikely that it would be something as highly energetic as a gamma-ray burst. If an explosion like this exploded inside the Milky Way, it would be visible To the naked eye, this was not the case.
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