Judith Racusin was 35,000 feet in the air when the biggest explosion in history happened. Racusin said that after landing, he looked at his phone and had many messages. It was amazing.
A long gamma-ray burst is a Cosmic event where a dying star releases powerful jets of energy as it collapses into a black hole. The NASA telescope designed to observe such events was overrun by this burst. Andrew Levan said that there were so many particles that they couldn't keep up. The ionosphere appeared to swell in size for several hours after the burst. The ability to change Earth's ionosphere from an object halfway across the universe is amazing.
Astronomers called it the BOAT, which means "brightest of all time", and began to squeeze it for more information. Eric Burns is an astronomer at Louisiana State University. It doesn't seem like this really happened to me.
There are at least two reasons why the boat was so bright. It happened about 2.4 billion light-years away from Earth. It is possible that the boat pointed towards us. The type of event that occurs only once every few hundred years is made possible by the two factors.
It is possible that the most consequential observation occurred in China. There is an observatory in the province that tracks high-energy particles from space. Researchers have only seen a small amount of high-energy particles from these objects. There were 5,000 people at this event. Sylvia Zhu, an astronomer at the German electron synchrotron (DESY), said that the burst went off directly above them.
A suspected high-energy photon at 18 Teraelectron volts is four times higher than anything seen from a gamma-ray burst before and more energetic than the highest energies achievable by the Large Hadron collider. The high-energy photon should have been lost on the way to Earth.
How did it make it here? There is a chance that a high-energy photon was converted into axion-like particles. Axion-like particles are thought to be a bit heftier than axions. Strong magnetic fields can be used to convert high-energy photon into particles. The axion-like particle would be able to travel across the vast expanse of space. Magnetic fields would convert it into a photon and then it would travel to Earth.
The mechanism was suggested by multiple teams of astrophysicists in the week after the initial detection. One of the first of these papers was written by Giorgio Galanti, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy.
Some researchers are wondering if the detection is a case of mistaken identity. It is possible that the high-energy photon came from somewhere else. Milena Crnogorevi is an astronomer at the University of Maryland. I think it's a background event. A higher-energy 251 TeV photon came from the burst and was reported by a Russian observatory. Racusin said that the jury was out on that. I'm a little cautious.
The results of the observations have not been made public. Burns hopes that the BOAT will be studied. He is curious to see what they have. He understands why wariness may be justified. Burns said that he would be cautious if he were sitting on data that had a small chance of being a proof of dark matter. If the photon can be linked to the BOAT, it would be evidence of new physics. A request for comment was not responded to by the team.
The amount of light seen from the event could be used to answer some of the biggest questions about the jet itself. What is the jet's purpose? Tyler Parsotan, an astronomer, asked what was going on in the jet as it moved out into space. Those are huge questions.
The BOAT could be used to determine why some stars produce gamma-ray bursts. The astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said that it was one of the biggest mysteries. It has to be very large. A galaxy like ours is capable of producing a burst of radiation. Why does a small group of people make so much noise?
The question of whether a black hole or a neutron star is at the core of the collapsed star is an open one. The BOAT suggests that the former happened. It has to be a black hole because of the amount of energy in the jet.
It is certain that this is a Cosmic event that will not be repeated many times. Burns said that they would all be dead before they got the chance to do it again.
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