Daily Times

On 14 January, a suite of space- and ground-based telescopes detected the most powerful gamma ray burst ever seen, an mind-boggling flash from an exploding star that released more energy in a few seconds than the Sun will generate over its entire 10-billion-year life. The detected radiation was up to a trillion times more energetic than visible light.

It became the most powerful yet detected by a specialized telescope on Earth’s surface, where scientists registered the highest energy gamma rays ever measured from a gamma ray burst, reaching about 100 billion times as much energy as visible light. The MAGIC telescope in the Canary Islands was able to point to the region of origin so quickly that it began observing the event within only 57 seconds of the space-based observations. Its scientists presented their observations last week (November 20, 2019) in two independent studies in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

The explosions were gamma-rays bursts or short eruptions of the most energetic form of light in the universe, reported Business Insider, adding that the first burst was caught in July 2018, while the second that was captured in January, produced light that contained 100 billion times as much energy as the light visible to human eyes.

According to the report, telescopes (Hubble Space Telescope) on Earth had to catch the light barely 50 seconds after the Gamma-ray bursts appeared, since they last for only a few seconds.

“Hubble’s observations suggest that this particular burst was sitting in a very dense environment, right in the middle of a bright galaxy 5 billion light years away. This is really unusual, and suggests that this concentrated location might be why it produced this exceptionally powerful light,” explained one of the lead authors, Andrew Levan of the Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics Department of Astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

“Scientists have been trying to observe very high energy emission from gamma-ray bursts for a long time,” explained lead author Antonio de Ugarte Postigo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain. “This new Hubble observation of accompanying lower-energy radiation from the region is a vital step in our understanding of gamma-ray bursts [and] their immediate surroundings.”

Scientists had long suspected that this scattering was one way gamma-ray bursts could produce so much ultra-high-energy light in the afterglow phase. The observations of these two bursts confirmed that for the first time.

Scientists expect to learn more as they turn telescopes toward more gamma-ray bursts like these in the future.

“Thanks to these new ground-based detections, we’re seeing the gamma rays from gamma-ray bursts in a whole new way,” Hays said.