© DESY, Science Communication Lab
An artist's depiction of a gamma-ray burst's relativistic jet full of very-high-energy photons breaking out of a collapsing star.
A team of scientists has gotten their best look yet at a
gamma-ray burst, the
most dramatic type of explosion in the universe.
Astronomers think some of these explosions occur when a massive star — five or 10 times the mass of our sun — detonates, abruptly becoming a
black hole. Gamma-ray bursts may also occur when two superdense stellar corpses called neutron stars collide, often forming a black hole. And conveniently, a gamma-ray burst that scientists watched during a few nights in 2019 likely occurred only about 1 billion
light-years away from Earth, relatively close by for these dramatic events.
"We were really sitting in the front row when this gamma-ray burst happened," Andrew Taylor, a physicist at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (German Electron Synchrotron, or DESY) and co-author on the new paper,
said in a statement. "We could observe the afterglow for several days and to unprecedented gamma-ray energies."
Two NASA space-based observatories,
Fermi and
Swift, first detected the event, which is known as GRB 190829A because it was detected on Aug. 29, 2019. The fireworks came from the direction of the constellation Eridanus, a large swath of sky in the Southern Hemisphere.
When the scientists behind the new research heard about the gamma-ray burst detection, they mobilized a set of five gamma-ray telescopes in Namibia, called the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS).
Over three nights, the telescopes observed the explosion for a total of 13 hours, in an attempt to understand what took place.
Comment: Whilst it does appear that our planet is undergoing a significant shift, with species going extinct as a result - and this is of grave concern - the sheer number of 'rediscoveries' of species leads one to think that perhaps researchers are declaring extinction status far too early, and this may point to a certain ideological blind within their field: