Some of the most violent events in the universe produce high-energy photons, which is the name of the particle.
Particles of light are packets of energy. Particles can behave like waves because of wave-particle duality. The location of the electrons on the spectrum is determined by the wavelength of their light. At the lower end of the spectrum are radio and microwave photons, while at the higher end are ultraviolet, X-rays and the most energetic of them all.
The wavelengths of the rays are shorter than 1011 meters. The European Space Agency describes the amount of energy in a single photon. We can compare this to X-rays that NASA says have energies between 100 eV and 100,000 eV, and optical photons that we can see with our eyes.
What is the Cosmic Microwave Background?
Nuclear weapons, radioactive decay, and lightning all produce gamma rays on Earth, while high-energy sources such as solar flares, quasars, and black holes produce them in space.
Two forms of radiation emitted by decaying atoms were known at the turn of the 20th century.
When the French chemist Paul Villard began experimenting with the radioactive element radium, he noticed that the ionizing radiation produced by the decay of radium packed a harder punch than any of the other particles.
The radiation was named after the third letter in the Greek alphabet. In the early 1900s, Villard and his friends were unaware that the key difference between the two types of particles was that they are made of matter.
The thickness of a dense material is related to the substance. If you want to reduce the strength of incoming radiation by a billion, you need water, concrete, and/or lead.
This poses a problem for the telescopes. Ordinary telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope don't use mirrors or lens to collect and focus light, but they do use telescopes to look at things. The telescopes have to use other methods.
The Anti-coincidence Detector is a device on the Fermi Space Telescope that blocks Cosmic rays that might give a false signal. The material that is absorbed by the gamma-ray is dense enough to prevent it from hitting the ground.
The path of the antimatter or antiparticle counterpart of an electron, which is read by a tracker, can be determined by the direction in which a module of Silicon strips is interwoven.
The energy of the gamma-ray can be determined with the help of a calorimeter, which is a device that absorbs the energy of a particle.
Because of their high energy, gamma rays can damage living cells and cause a health hazard. It depends on the amount of radiation you get.
They can be used safely as a medical diagnostic tool or even to kill cancer cells if they are carefully targeted. The Gamma Knife is an ultra-precise form of surgery in which a beam of rays cuts away brain cells and can even penetrate deep into the brain without damaging the outside of the brain.
Earth's atmosphere is able to block the radiation from space. Astronomers have to either build telescopes on mountaintops where the atmosphere is thinner or send them into space because of that unfortunate fact.
The first space telescope was launched in 1961, but it wasn't until the late 1960s and early 1970s that a major finding was made.
There are many observatories on the ground and in space that have been designed to observe the rays of the sun. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched by NASA in 1990. Between 1996 and 2003 NASA launched HETE-2 (the High-Energy Transient Explorer; HETE-1 had previously failed) that tracked down many, while the BeppoSAX was a joint Italian–Dutch mission.
NASA's Swift satellite and Italy's AGILE satellite combine both X-ray and gamma-ray observations. INTEGRAL was launched in 2002 by the European space agency. NASA launched the most advanced space telescope in 2008.
There are several gamma-ray observatories on the ground including the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona.
In 1963, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States signed a treaty prohibiting the use of nuclear devices in the atmosphere or in space. The US launched the Vela series of satellites because they were suspicious that the Soviet Union wouldn't abide by the treaty. Random blasts of powerful gamma-ray energy that seemed to be coming from all around the Earth were detected. How far away were they from us?
The most powerful gamma-ray burst has the potential to reveal how black holes are created.
Astronomers would be able to detect the GRBs in the plane of the Milky Way if they came from our galaxy. They were spread all over the sky. They could either be within our solar system or far away. A debate about the size of our galaxy was held in 1995, just like the one that took place in 1920.
Donald Lamb of the University of Chicago argued that GRBs must be from close by because of the energy needed for them to be billions of light years away.
The William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands was able to detect the faint afterglow of the GRB after it was detected by the BeppoSAX satellite. The light that came from six billion light-years away was measured. He was correct.
Two main types of GRB are present. The short GRBs can last fractions of a second, while the long GRBs can last many seconds. During the merger of two stars, short GRBS and long GRBs are emitted.
Physicists Andrew MacFadyen and Stan Woosley of the University of California, Santa Cruz created a model to explain how stars explode and produce long GRBs. The particles within the jets produce a type of radiation known as synchrotron radiation. The laws of physics don't apply to the total energy released because it is only released in the direction of the jets.
Ionizing radiation can be found with the EPA and the American Cancer Society. You can explore the spectrum in more detail with NASA science.
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It's flash! The hunt for the biggest explosions in the universe was written by Govert Schilling.
The Most Violent Explosions in the Universe was written by Jonathan Kaplan.
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