On the morning of October 9th, NASA's Swift Observatory detected a fresh burst of energy, which was assumed to be coming from our own galaxy. The event was flagged by an instrument on the Fermi Space Telescope six hours later. It said that the source is likely to be a burst of radiation. We strongly encourage follow-up because this would suggest a highly energetic eruption. This was a great chance to make a career out of it.
Around the world, astronomer sprang into action. They wanted to point their telescopes at this powerful explosion of energy. The astronomer says that by jetted, he means like a firehose of emissions. Black holes are thought to be caused by the collapse of giant stars that create the supernova. It is likely that one of the jets was pointed directly at Earth after the burst went off about 2 billion light years away. When these factors were combined, they made for a flash at least 10 times brighter than all the others spotted in the three decades since such bursts were first discovered.
I was wondering if this was real. It is an extremely rare, once-in-a-Lifetime type of event. She and others are in the process of gathering data that they hope will confirm that the rays came from a supernova and help them understand how much of the collapsing material got spat out by the infant black hole.
It is rare to catch a supernovae in conjunction with a gamma-ray burst because they are so far away. Scientists expect the supernova to be clear since it was so intense. The community has been rejuvenated by it. Everyone who has a telescope, even if they don't normally study gamma-ray bursts, is trying to point their detector at this to get the most complete dataset that we can
For several hundred seconds, the blast recorded a lot of radiation. There were x-rays, optical and IR light, and radio waves. Astronomers at ground-based telescopes want to capture this afterglow because they want to understand the types of stars that produce such bursts, the mechanisms that drive them, and the environments they produce. These insights could shed light on whether stellar deaths make life possible for us on Earth by producing heavy elements that can heat a planet's interior and help maintain its magnetic field.
The emission spans nearly all wavelength of light and has turned the postmortem into a global scientific event. NASA's NuSTAR is measuring its high energy x-rays while other sites are collecting the burst's radio emission One night, if we don't get data, we can pretty much guarantee that someone will. They are leading the observations of visible light from the burst using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, data that will be supplemented by measurements from theLowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona, and India's Devasthal Fast Optical Telescope. Scientists reported the afterglow from the James Webb Space Telescope.
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