#GRB 221009A

[mindblowingscience]

In October 2022, astronomers were stunned by what was quickly dubbed the BOAT—the brightest-of-all-time gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now an international science team reports that data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a feature never seen before. "A few minutes after the BOAT erupted, Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor recorded an unusual energy peak that caught our attention," said lead researcher Maria Edvige Ravasio at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and affiliated with Brera Observatory, part of INAF (the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics) in Merate, Italy. "When I first saw that signal, it gave me goosebumps. Our analysis since then shows it to be the first high-confidence emission line ever seen in 50 years of studying GRBs." A paper about the discovery appears in the journal Science.

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[wumblr]

On Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022, a pulse of intense radiation swept through the solar system so exceptional that astronomers quickly dubbed it the BOAT – the brightest of all time. With this type of GRB, astronomers expect to find a brightening supernova a few weeks later, but so far it has proven elusive. One reason is that the GRB appeared in a part of the sky that’s just a few degrees above the plane of our own galaxy, where thick dust clouds can greatly dim incoming light. The burst also enabled astronomers to probe distant dust clouds in our own galaxy, creating extended “light echoes” of the initial blast in the form of X-ray rings expanding from the burst’s location. Detailed follow-up revealed these extraordinary rings were produced by 21 distinct dust clouds.

The burst was so bright it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which means they could not directly record the real intensity of the emission, 70 times brighter than any yet seen. “GRB 221009A was likely the brightest burst to occur since human civilization began,” said Eric Burns. He led an analysis of some 7,000 GRBs to establish how frequently events this bright may occur. Their answer: once in every 10,000 years. Astronomers think these bursts represent the birth cries of black holes formed when the cores of massive stars collapse under their own weight. As it quickly ingests the surrounding matter, the black hole blasts out jets in opposite directions containing particles accelerated to near the speed of light. These jets pierce through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays as they stream into space.

“We cannot say conclusively that there is a supernova, which is surprising given the burst’s brightness,” said Andrew Levan. “If it’s there, it’s very faint. We plan to keep looking, but it’s possible the entire star collapsed straight into the black hole instead of exploding.” “Twenty-five years of afterglow models that have worked very well cannot completely explain this jet,” Kate Alexander said. “In particular, we found a new radio component we don’t fully understand. This may indicate additional structure within the jet or suggest the need to revise our models of how GRB jets interact with their surroundings.” “We think of black holes as all-consuming things, but do they also return power back to the universe?” asked Michela Negro.

NASA

[jcmarchi]

Gamma-ray Burst Strikes Earth from Distant Exploding Star - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/gamma-ray-burst-strikes-earth-from-distant-exploding-star-technology-org/

Gamma-ray Burst Strikes Earth from Distant Exploding Star - Technology Org

An enormous burst of gamma rays, detected by ESA’s Integral space telescope, has struck Earth. The blast caused a significant disturbance in our planet’s ionosphere.

Such disturbances are usually associated with energetic particle events on the Sun but this one resulted from an exploding star almost two billion light-years away. Analysing the effects of the blast could provide information about the mass extinctions in Earth’s history.

Gamma-ray burst strikes Earth from the distant exploding star. Image credit: ESA/ATG Europe; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO 

At 14:21 BST / 15:21 CEST on 9 October 2022, an extremely bright and long-lasting gamma-ray burst (GRB) was detected by many of the high-energy satellites in orbit close to the Earth, including ESA’s Integral mission. 

The International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) was launched by ESA in 2002 and has been detecting gamma-ray bursts almost every day since that time. However, GRB 221009A, as the blast was named, was anything but ordinary. “It was probably the brightest gamma-ray burst we have ever detected,” says Mirko Piersanti, University of L’Aquila, Italy, and lead author of the team publishing these results today. 

Gamma-ray bursts were once mysterious events but are now recognised to be the outpouring of energy from exploding stars called supernovae, or from the collision of two super-dense neutron stars. 

“We’ve been measuring gamma-ray bursts since the 1960s, and this is the strongest ever measured,” says co-author Pietro Ubertini, National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome, Italy, and the principal investigator for Intergral’s IBIS instrument. So strong in fact that its nearest rival on record is ten times weaker. Statistically, a GRB as strong as GRB 221009A arrives at Earth only once every 10 000 years. 

During the 800 seconds that the gamma rays were impacting, the burst delivered enough energy to activate lightning detectors in India. Instruments in Germany picked up signs that Earth’s ionosphere was disturbed for several hours by the blast. This extreme amount of energy gave the team the idea to look for the burst’s effects on Earth’s ionosphere. 

The ionosphere is the layer of Earth’s upper atmosphere that contains electrically charged gases called plasma. It stretches from around 50 km to 950 km in altitude. Researchers refer to it as the top-side ionosphere above 350 km, and the bottom-side ionosphere below that. The ionosphere is so tenuous that spacecraft can hold orbits in most of the ionosphere. 

One of those spacecraft is the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES), also known as Zhangheng, a Chinese-Italian space mission. It was launched in 2018 and monitors the top side of the ionosphere for changes in its electromagnetic behaviour.

Its primary mission is to study possible links between changes in the ionosphere and the occurrence of seismic events such as earthquakes, but it can also study the impact of solar activity on the ionosphere. 

Both Mirko and Pietro are part of the science team for CSES and they realised that if the GRB had created a disturbance, CSES should have seen it. But they could not be sure. “We had looked for this effect from other GRBs in the past but had seen nothing,” says Pietro.

Gamma-ray burst illustration. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

In the past, GRBs have been spotted affecting the bottom-side ionosphere during the night, when the solar influence is removed, but never in the top side. This had led to the belief that by the time it reached Earth, the blast from a GRB was no longer powerful enough to produce a variation in the ionospheric conductivity leading to an electric field variation.  

This time, however, when the scientists looked, their luck was different. The effect was obvious and strong. For the first time ever, they saw an intense perturbation in the form of a strong electric field variation in the top-side ionosphere. “It is amazing. We can see things that are happening in deep space but are also affecting Earth,” says Erik Kuulkers, ESA Project Scientist.

This particular GRB took place in a galaxy almost 2 billion light-years away – hence two billion years ago – yet it still had enough energy to affect Earth. While the Sun is typically the primary source of radiation robust enough to affect Earth’s ionosphere, this GRB triggered instruments generally reserved for studying the immense explosions in the Sun’s atmosphere known as solar flares.

“Notably, this disturbance impacted the very lowest layers of Earth’s ionosphere, situated just tens of kilometres above our planet’s surface, leaving an imprint comparable to that of a major solar flare,” says Laura Hayes, research fellow and solar physicist at ESA. 

This imprint came in the form of an increase in ionisation in the bottom-side ionosphere. It was detected in very low frequency radio signals that bounce between the ground and Earths lower ionosphere. “Essentially, we can say that the ionosphere ‘moved’ down to lower altitudes, and we detected this in how the radio waves bounce along the ionosphere,” explains Laura, who published these results in 2022.  

It reinforces the idea that a supernova in our own galaxy might have much more serious consequences. “There has been a great debate about the possible consequences of a gamma-ray burst in our own galaxy,” says Mirko. 

In the worst case, the burst would not only affect the ionosphere, it could also damage the ozone layer, allowing dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the Sun to reach Earth’s surface. Such an effect has been speculated to be a possible cause of some of the mass extinction events known to have taken place on Earth in the past. But to investigate the idea, we will need a lot more data. 

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Now that they know exactly what to search for, the team has already started looking back into the data collected by CSES and correlating it with the other gamma-ray bursts seen by Integral.

And while they can only go back to 2018, when CSES was launched, a follow-up mission has already been planned, ensuring that this fascinating new window into the way Earth interacts with even the very distant Universe will now remain open.  

Source: European Space Agency

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[saevus-brutalis]

man, go tagged like forever ago by @katsigian but i guess i forgot akjdsgh

𝐨𝐜 𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 — 𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐣𝐚𝐡 𝐯𝐚𝐡𝐧

𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐥: amur tiger 𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐫: vanta black, mulled grape #675A74 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡: late november, first week of january 𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐠: — Frank Sinatra, Rain In My Heart — Blood Red Shoes, Elijah — Jim Croce, Time In A Bottle — Engelbert Humperdinck, A Man Without Love 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫: 4, 7 𝐰𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫: sea storm, raging snowstorm

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[spaceadvances]

The most energetic kind of explosion in the universe after Big Bang, a gamma-ray burst can be spotted billions of light-years away. GRB 221009A was so luminous it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space when it was detected Oct. 9, 2022.

📽: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

[andromeda1023]

NASA Missions Study What May Be a 1-In-10,000-Year Gamma-ray Burst

Top picture: XMM-Newton images recorded 20 dust rings, 19 of which are shown here in arbitrary colors. This composite merges observations made two and five days after GRB 221009A erupted. Dark stripes indicate gaps between the detectors. A detailed analysis shows that the widest ring visible here, comparable to the apparent size of a full moon, came from dust clouds located about 1,300 light-years away. The innermost ring arose from dust at a distance of 61,000 light-years – on the other side of our galaxy. GRB221009A is only the seventh gamma-ray burst to display X-ray rings, and it triples the number previously seen around one. Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/M. Rigoselli (INAF)

Bottom Pic: This illustration shows the ingredients of a long gamma-ray burst, the most common type. The core of a massive star (left) has collapsed, forming a black hole that sends a jet of particles moving through the collapsing star and out into space at nearly the speed of light. Radiation across the spectrum arises from hot ionized gas (plasma) in the vicinity of the newborn black hole, collisions among shells of fast-moving gas within the jet (internal shock waves), and from the leading edge of the jet as it sweeps up and interacts with its surroundings (external shock). Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

On Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022, a pulse of intense radiation swept through the solar system so exceptional that astronomers quickly dubbed it the BOAT – the brightest of all time. The source was a gamma-ray burst (GRB), the most powerful class of explosions in the universe.

The burst triggered detectors on numerous spacecraft, and observatories around the globe followed up. After combing through all of this data, astronomers can now characterize just how bright it was and better understand its scientific impact.

“GRB 221009A was likely the brightest burst at X-ray and gamma-ray energies to occur since human civilization began,” said Eric Burns, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He led an analysis of some 7,000 GRBs – mostly detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Russian Konus instrument on NASA’s Wind spacecraft – to establish how frequently events this bright may occur. Their answer: once in every 10,000 years.

The burst was so bright it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which means they could not directly record the real intensity of the emission. U.S. scientists were able to reconstruct this information from the Fermi data. They then compared the results with those from the Russian team working on Konus data and Chinese teams analyzing observations from the GECAM-C detector on their SATech-01 satellite and instruments on their Insight-HXMT observatory. Together, they prove the burst was 70 times brighter than any yet seen.

Further reading, video: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nasa-missions-study-what-may-be-a-1-in-10000-year-gamma-ray-burst

[insurgentepress]

La línea de rayos gamma GRB 221009A es la de mayor energía del universo

Un artículo publicado en @AAS_Press reveló que un equipo de astrofísicos chinos han descubierto que línea espectral de rayos gamma GRB 221009A de hasta 37 millones de electronvoltios, la más energética registrada por objetos celestes en el universo.

Agencias, Ciudad de México.- Astrofísicos chinos han descubierto una línea espectral de rayos gamma de hasta 37 millones de electronvoltios, la más energética registrada por objetos celestes en el universo. Además, el grupo de investigación dirigido por el Instituto de Física de Altas Energías (IHEP) de la Academia China de Ciencias (CAS) descubrió que la línea espectral –producida a partir de un…

[astroblogs]

[gaetaniu]

I ricercatori confermano che l'esplosione di raggi gamma più luminosa di tutti i tempi proviene dal collasso di una stella massiccia

Visualizzazione artistica del GRB 221009A che mostra gli stretti getti relativistici – provenienti da un buco nero centrale – che hanno dato origine al GRB e i resti in espansione della stella originale espulsi dall’esplosione della supernova. Utilizzando il telescopio spaziale James Webb, Peter Blanchard, borsista della Northwestern University, e il suo team hanno individuato per la prima volta…

[mindblowingscience]

A burst of light from a newborn black hole billions of light-years away in space and time has struck Earth with such power, it rattled the planet's upper atmosphere. The gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A shattered records as it flared in the darkness of space in October 2022 some 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, its light blazing with up to 18 teraelectronvolts of energy in what is regarded as the brightest space explosion ever recorded. Now, scientists have determined that the explosion was so powerful that it caused large variations in the electric field of Earth's ionosphere, at an altitude of some 500 kilometers (310 miles). "In this work we present the evidence of variation of the ionospheric electric field at about 500 kilometers induced by the strong gamma-ray burst [that] occurred on October 9th, 2022," write a team led by astrophysicist Mirko Piersanti of the University of L'Aquila and the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy.

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[zehub]

La création d'un trou noir a fortement impacté l'atmosphère terrestre en 2022

L'Univers, dans ses manifestations les plus spectaculaires, nous a récemment offert un phénomène hors du commun. En octobre 2022, un sursaut gamma d'une luminosité sans précédent a été détecté par des satellites spécialisés orbitant autour de la Terre. Surnommé le "plus brillant de tous les temps" (Brightest Of All Time - BOAT) et officiellement désigné GRB 221009A, ce sursaut a été causé par l'explosion

[spacenutspod]

Astronomers with The LHAASO Collaboration have found that last year's GRB 221009A gamma-ray burst, subsequently nicknamed the Brightest of All Time (BOAT), carried with it 13 teraelectronvolts of energy. In their study, reported in the journal Science Advances, the group analyzed data from the LHAASO-KM2A detector located in in Sichuan, China, to learn more about the burst.