Posted on 10/12/2022 7:35:55 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Initially dubbed Swift J1913.1+1946...now re-named GRB221009A.
2.4 billion light-years away...18 teraelectronvolts.
[T]hough this proximity happens to be 20 times closer than the average long gamma-ray burst, it poses absolutely no danger to life on Earth.
Rather, it's tremendously exciting – an event that could
These bursts mark the end of the life of a massive star – a supernova or hypernova. They can also emerge from a collision between two neutron stars.
Different gamma-ray burst profiles mean different kinds of explosions, which fade in different ways. When astronomers observed a collision between two neutron stars in 2017, it produced a short gamma-ray burst. Long-duration bursts are associated with unusually powerful events, superluminous supernovae and hypernovae.
It's unclear, yet, what we're looking at with GRB221009A.
What we do know is that the burst appears to have emerged from a very dusty galaxy, and that it was very powerful. And the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), a Cherenkov observatory in China, has detected photons with energies up to roughly 18 teraelectronvolts (TeV). To date, just a handful of gamma-ray bursts have been detected with emission in the TeV range; if the LHAASO data is verified, GRB221009A will be the first above 10 TeV.
There is, for now, a lot of science to be done in the days following the outburst. Scientists are training telescopes to the location of the object to observe the behavior of the afterglow across as many wavelengths as possible, information crucial to uncovering in detail the cause of the explosion.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
Git over yo bad self. Gamma rays were only discovered 122 years ago, so just how monumentous is that record anyway?
This sounds like the clowns whining about the hole in the ozone layer. No one has any idea how common holes in the ozone were before we developed the technology to test for it.
They're all drowning in recency bias.
You do not want to be in the way of a gamma-ray burst. Most all living things on the entire planet would die right away. Zap!
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