NASA astronomers recently observed a burst of gamma-ray bursts that they called the brightest ever: “BOAT,” JEE News reports.
According to NASA, the explosion occurred on October 9, 2022, passed through the solar system and was detected by the spacecraft and was 70 times brighter than ever before.
NASA has also uploaded an illustrative video that attempts to show what a gamma-ray burst looks like in space.
He also said that scientists have been studying the event for months, which “effectively blinded” most instruments used to detect such eruptions.
Using data from American astronomers, the information was reconstructed and the analysis was also compared with Russian and Chinese astronomers.
Eric Burns, assistant professor of physics and astronomy – who has analyzed about 7,000 such bursts – believes this is the first such event since human civilization began on Earth and occurs every 10,000 years.
The signals detected by the instrument traveled for 1.9 billion years before reaching Earth.
“Astronomers believe these explosions represent the birth sound of black holes when the cores of massive stars collapse under their own weight. As it quickly swallows up the surrounding matter, the black hole moves in opposite directions. Jets blast jets of particles at speeds close to light,” NASA noted.
Scientists are now waiting for a supernova that occurs a few weeks after the gamma-ray burst.
“We cannot definitively say that there is a supernova, which is surprising given the brightness of the burst,” said Andrew Lewin, a professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
“If it’s there, it’s very faint. We plan to keep watching, but it’s possible that the entire star will fall straight into the black hole instead of exploding,” he said.
The burst has enabled astronomers to study distant clouds and jets of gamma-ray bursts.
