#gamma-ray burst

[netmassimo]

An article published in the journal "Nature Astronomy" reports a study on the gamma-ray burst cataloged as GRB221009A, the brightest ever detected, which confirms that it was caused by the collapse of a massive star, which subsequently exploded in a supernova. A team of researchers led by Northwestern University used data collected with the James Webb Space Telescope and the ALMA radio telescope to obtain the information needed to support their conclusions. The mystery remains of the absence of traces of the generation of heavy elements such as platinum and gold, which they thought could be associated with supernovae that lead to very powerful gamma-ray bursts.

[kestarren]

Gamma Ray Burst (Id: noirlab2319a, Release date: 22 June '23), space art by Mark A. Garlick & Mahdi Zamani. Article:

[jcmarchi]

The Goldmine of a Neutron Star Collision - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-goldmine-of-a-neutron-star-collision-technology-org/

The Goldmine of a Neutron Star Collision - Technology Org

International research team models the different signatures of a kilonova explosion simultaneously for the first time.

Neutron stars are the end products of massive stars and gather together a large part of the original stellar mass in a super-dense star with a diameter of only around ten kilometres. On 17 August 2017, researchers observed the manifold signatures of an explosive merger of two orbiting neutron stars for the first time: gravitational waves and enormous bursts of radiation including a gamma-ray burst.

An international research team has developed a method to model these observable signals of a kilonova simultaneously. This enables them to precisely describe what exactly happens during a merger, how nuclear matter behaves under extreme conditions and why the gold on Earth must have been created in such events.

Numerical simulation of the resulting ejecta material of two merging neutron stars. Red colors refer to ejected material with a high fraction of neutrons which will appear typically redder than blue material that contains a higher fraction of protons. Image credit: I. Markin (University of Potsdam)

Using a new software tool, a team involving the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the University of Potsdam has succeeded in simultaneously interpreting the various types of astrophysical data from a kilonova.

In addition, data from radio and X-ray observations of other neutron stars, nuclear physics calculations and even data from heavy-ion collision experiments on earthbound accelerators can be used. Until now, the various data sources have been analysed separately and the data interpreted using different physical models in some cases.

“By analysing the data coherently and simultaneously, we get more precise results,” says Peter T. H. Pang, scientist at Utrecht University. 

“Our new method will help to analyze the properties of matter at extreme densities. It will also allow us to better understand the expansion of the universe and to what extent heavy elements are formed during neutron star mergers,” explains Tim Dietrich, professor at the University of Potsdam and head of a Max Planck Fellow group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.

Extreme conditions in a cosmic laboratory

A neutron star is a superdense astrophysical object formed at the end of a massive star’s life in a supernova explosion. Like other compact objects, some neutron stars orbit each other in binary systems.

They lose energy through the constant emission of gravitational waves – tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time – and eventually collide. Such mergers allow researchers to study physical principles under the most extreme conditions in the universe.

For example, the conditions of these high-energy collisions lead to the formation of heavy elements such as gold. Indeed, merging neutron stars are unique objects for studying the properties of matter at densities far beyond those found in atomic nuclei.   The new method was applied to the first and so far only multi-messenger observation of binary neutron star mergers.

In this event, discovered on August 17, 2017, the stars’ last few thousand orbits around each other had warped space-time enough to create gravitational waves, which were detected by the terrestrial gravitational-wave observatories Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. As the two stars merged, newly formed heavy elements were ejected.

Some of these elements decayed radioactively, causing the temperature to rise. Triggered by this thermal radiation, an electromagnetic signal in the optical, infrared, and ultraviolet was detected up to two weeks after the collision.

A gamma-ray burst, also caused by the neutron star merger, ejected additional material. The reaction of the neutron star’s matter with the surrounding medium produced X-rays and radio emissions that could be monitored on time scales ranging from days to years.

Source: MPG

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[nasa]

Tiny BurstCube's Tremendous Travelogue

Meet BurstCube! This shoebox-sized satellite is designed to study the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, called gamma-ray bursts. It detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.

BurstCube may be small, but it had a huge journey to get to space.

First, BurstCube was designed and built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Here you can see Julie Cox, an early career engineer, working on BurstCube’s gamma-ray detecting instrument in the Small Satellite Lab at Goddard.

BurstCube is a type of spacecraft called a CubeSat. These tiny missions give early career engineers and scientists the chance to learn about mission development — as well as do cool science!

Then, after assembling the spacecraft, the BurstCube team took it on the road to conduct a bunch of tests to determine how it will operate in space. Here you can see another early career engineer, Kate Gasaway, working on BurstCube at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

She and other members of the team used a special facility there to map BurstCube’s magnetic field. This will help them know where the instrument is pointing when it’s in space.

The next stop was back at Goddard, where the team put BurstCube in a vacuum chamber. You can see engineers Franklin Robinson, Elliot Schwartz, and Colton Cohill lowering the lid here. They changed the temperature inside so it was very hot and then very cold. This mimics the conditions BurstCube will experience in space as it orbits in and out of sunlight.

Then, up on a Goddard rooftop, the team — including early career engineer Justin Clavette — tested BurstCube’s GPS. This so-called open-sky test helps ensure the team can locate the satellite once it’s in orbit.

The next big step in BurstCube’s journey was a flight to Houston! The team packed it up in a special case and took it to the airport. Of course, BurstCube got the window seat!

Once in Texas, the BurstCube team joined their partners at Nanoracks (part of Voyager Space) to get their tiny spacecraft ready for launch. They loaded the satellite into a rectangular frame called a deployer, along with another small satellite called SNoOPI (Signals of Opportunity P-band Investigation). The deployer is used to push spacecraft into orbit from the International Space Station.

From Houston, BurstCube traveled to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where it launched on SpaceX’s 30th commercial resupply servicing mission on March 21, 2024. BurstCube traveled to the station along with some other small satellites, science experiments, as well as a supply of fresh fruit and coffee for the astronauts.

A few days later, the mission docked at the space station, and the astronauts aboard began unloading all the supplies, including BurstCube!

And finally, on April 18, 2024, BurstCube was released into orbit. The team will spend a month getting the satellite ready to search the skies for gamma-ray bursts. Then finally, after a long journey, this tiny satellite can embark on its big mission!

BurstCube wouldn’t be the spacecraft it is today without the input of many early career engineers and scientists. Are you interested in learning more about how you can participate in a mission like this one? There are opportunities for students in middle and high school as well as college!

Keep up on BurstCube’s journey with NASA Universe on X and Facebook. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[mindblowingscience]

After its "birth" in the Big Bang, the Universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day. Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it. In order to explain the presence of these heavier elements today, it's necessary to find phenomena that can produce them.

Continue Reading.

[chibinotan]

Traveling Stars

[elbiotipo]

The Rare Earth hypothesis used to distress me a lot when I was younger but nowadays it's kind of comforting to know that life-bearing planets are in manageable numbers to my brain. Because 40 billion habitable planets in the galaxy is a bit too much for my head.

[livingforstars]

Gamma Ray Bursts from the Unknown - August 27th, 1995.

"Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) pose one of the greatest mysteries of modern astronomy. About once a day, the gamma-ray sky lights up with a spectacular explosion. No one knows what causes these explosions or even how far away they are. The above map represents the entire sky in coordinates centered on our galaxy, the Milky Way. It shows the positions of over 800 of these mysterious bursts of energy, detected by the BATSE instrument onboard NASA'S Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Before BATSE, most astronomers thought that most GRBs occurred in the disk of our galaxy, but the above sky map shows little sign of this. The distance scale of GRBs was the topic of a historic debate in April of 1995. The positions in the map above are currently being studied in great detail in an effort to uncover a clue about the nature of GRBs."

[netmassimo]

A special issue of "The Astrophysical Journal Letters" is focused on the gamma-ray burst cataloged as GRB221009A, indicated since the first estimates of its characteristics as the gamma-ray burst of the century. Various teams of researchers conducted various types of analyzes of the data collected by many instruments that detected the emissions from GRB221009A and the so-called afterglow, meaning from the residues of its emissions, in several electromagnetic bands. The wealth of data indicates that this is the most powerful gamma-ray burst ever observed and offers new insights into these extremely energetic phenomena. In this case, it was a long gamma-ray burst, probably generated by the collapse of the core of a massive star and the subsequent birth of a black hole.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA's mini BurstCube mission detects mega blast

The shoebox-sized BurstCube satellite has observed its first gamma-ray burst, the most powerful kind of explosion in the universe, according to a recent analysis of observations collected over the last several months.

“We’re excited to collect science data,” said Sean Semper, BurstCube’s lead engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s an important milestone for the team and for the many early career engineers and scientists that have been part of the mission.”

The event, called GRB 240629A, occurred on June 29 in the southern constellation Microscopium. The team announced the discovery in a GCN (General Coordinates Network) circular on August 29.

BurstCube deployed into orbit April 18 from the International Space Station, following a March 21 launch.

The mission was designed to detect, locate, and study short gamma-ray bursts, brief flashes of high-energy light created when superdense objects like neutron stars collide. These collisions also produce heavy elements like gold and iodine, an essential ingredient for life as we know it. 

BurstCube is the first CubeSat to use NASA’s TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite) system, a constellation of specialized communications spacecraft. Data relayed by TDRS (pronounced “tee-driss”) help coordinate rapid follow-up measurements by other observatories in space and on the ground through NASA’s GCN.

BurstCube also regularly beams data back to Earth using the Direct to Earth system — both it and TDRS are part of NASA’s Near Space Network.

After BurstCube deployed from the space station, the team discovered that one of the two solar panels failed to fully extend. It obscures the view of the mission’s star tracker, which hinders orienting the spacecraft in a way that minimizes drag. The team originally hoped to operate BurstCube for 12-18 months, but now estimates the increased drag will cause the satellite to re-enter the atmosphere in September. 

“I’m proud of how the team responded to the situation and is making the best use of the time we have in orbit,” said Jeremy Perkins, BurstCube’s principal investigator at Goddard. “Small missions like BurstCube not only provide an opportunity to do great science and test new technologies, like our mission’s gamma-ray detector, but also important learning opportunities for the up-and-coming members of the astrophysics community.”

BurstCube is led by Goddard. It’s funded by the Science Mission Directorate’s Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. The BurstCube collaboration includes: the University of Alabama in Huntsville; the University of Maryland, College Park; the Universities Space Research Association in Washington; the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington; and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

IMAGE: BurstCube, trailed by another CubeSat named SNOOPI (Signals of Opportunity P-band Investigation), emerges from the International Space Station on April 18, 2024. Credit NASA/Matthew Dominick

[spacenutspod]

In this episode of SpaceTime, we explore the possibility of Mercury harbouring a thick layer of solid diamond deep below its ancient surface. We also delve into new details about the brightest gamma ray burst of all time and discuss the recent surge in auroral activity as the sun approaches solar maximum. Join us for these fascinating updates and more! For more SpaceTime visit our website at www.spacetimewithstuartgary.com For more Space News podcasts, visit our HQ at www.bitesz.com

[mushroom-through-the-stargate]

according to google docs, stellar birth was started on april 14th (according to ao3 it was posted literally a month and a day later on may 15th). which means in 3½ months i have written 47.3k words for pn:au 😳 thats INSANE

[kny111]

Are Some Black Holes Wormholes In Disguise? Gamma-Ray Blasts May Shed Clues

I’ve recently in my spare time been doing some reading and reviewing on supermassive black holes, relativistic jets and wormholes especially after noticing that the supermassive black hole in the movie ‘Interstellar’ didn’t have an astrophysical jet which is required for a black hole to be supermassive. This had me thinking, where else were there any inconsistencies with our main views of black holes and quasars? What are the differences between them and what makes them a quasar?

Are there some that connect with each other at different dimensionalities beyond that of our own cosmos like what occurs with hyper-black holes or are their physics perfectly accountable for within current cosmology’s explanations without hyperdimensionality explanations?

The difficulty in even figuring this out in acquiring any data and what that data looks like is it’s so difficult to spot a black hole let a alone a wormhole. In this article from Space, writers try to figure out if any such connection occurs by observing the outbursts from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) which are a type of supermassive black hole heavier than those at our own galactic center. These are helpful for this type of study because the temperatures the gamma ray bursts they release can be quantified and better understood. Here’s more from the article:

Unusual flashes of gamma rays could reveal that what appear to be giant black holes are actually huge wormholes, a new study finds.

Wormholes are tunnels in space-time that can theoretically allow travel anywhere in space and time, or even into another universe. Einstein's theory of general relativity suggests wormholes are possible, although whether they really exist is another matter.

In many ways, wormholes resemble black holes. Both kinds of objects are extremely dense and possess extraordinarily strong gravitational pulls for bodies their size. The main difference is that no object can theoretically come back out after crossing a black hole's event horizon — the threshold where the speed needed to escape the black hole's gravitational pull exceeds the speed of light — whereas any body entering a wormhole could theoretically reverse course.

Assuming wormholes might exist, researchers investigated ways that one might distinguish a wormhole from a black hole. They focused on supermassive black holes with masses millions to billions of times that of the sun, which are thought to dwell at the hearts of most, if not all, galaxies. For example, at the center of our Milky Way galaxy lies Sagittarius A*, a monster black hole that is about 4.5 million solar masses in size.

Anything entering one mouth of a wormhole would exit out its other mouth. The scientists reasoned that meant that matter entering one mouth of a wormhole could potentially slam into matter entering the other mouth of the wormhole at the same time, a kind of event that would never happen with a black hole.

Any matter falling into a mouth of a supermassive wormhole would likely travel at extraordinarily high speeds due to its powerful gravitational fields. The scientists modeled the consequences of matter flowing through both mouths of a wormhole to where these mouths meet, the wormhole's "throat." The result of such collisions are spheres of plasma expanding out both mouths of the wormhole at nearly the speed of light, the researchers said.

"What surprises me most of all is that no one has proposed this idea before, because it is rather simple," study lead author Mikhail Piotrovich, an astrophysicist at the Central Astronomical Observatory in Saint Petersburg, Russia, told Space.com.

The researchers compared the outbursts from such wormholes with those from a kind of supermassive black hole known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which can spew out more radiation than our entire galaxy does as they devour matter around them, and do so from a patch of space no larger than our solar system. AGNs are typically surrounded by rings of plasma known as accretion disks and can emit powerful jets of radiation from their poles.

Full Article: Are Some Black Holes Wormholes In Disguise? Gamma-Ray Blasts May Shed Clues

[arctic-hands]

People are always being macho about how they'll face death with their eyes open, but then there's me who likes to think I'm brave having dreams where I'm about to die and I always close my eyes at the end