Scientists are taking a closer look at the afterglow left by the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, and what they see doesn't fit with any theoretical models.
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected is revealing new mysteries as scientists study it in greater detail.

In two new papers - one published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and another published on the preprint server arXiv and submitted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy - astronomers found that the evolution of the radio waves released by an enormous stellar explosion seen in 2022 was slower than models predicted, raising questions about how the release of energy evolves during ultra-powerful gamma-ray bursts.

"[I]t is very difficult for existing models to replicate the slow evolution of the energy peaks that we observed," James Leung, a doctoral student at the University of Sydney who co-authored the Nature Astronomy paper, said in a statement. "This means we have to refine and develop new theoretical models to understand these most extreme explosions in the Universe."

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are brief, bright flashes of gamma-ray light that are thought to be the most powerful explosions in our universe since the Big Bang. GRBs are released during extreme stellar explosions or supernovas, when a dying star runs out of fuel and collapses into a neutron star or even a black hole. The brightest burst ever seen, known as GRB 221009A, was first detected on Oct. 9, 2022 by gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes. The likely supernova that caused the burst was 2.4 billion light-years away from Earth.

Naked eye aurora australis visible from Franklin, Tasmania on the night of 23/3/2023. All the colours visible in this footage were visible to the naked eye, which is extremely rare for Aurora.

This is easily the biggest and brightest aurora display I've seen in the 23 years I have been chasing aurora. It doesn't get much better than this from Australia.

Aurora gets such a bad wrap for being colourless, but once it got bright enough the colour receptors in my eyes suddenly switched on.

It was like upgrading from a B&W TV to full HD.

As soon as the sun set Thursday, extreme weather photographer Peter Forister excitedly headed for the hills. Forecasts had suggested that recent storming on the surface of the sun could set off auroras — brilliant dancing streaks of light, also known as the northern lights — in the Lower 48 states. For the first hour or so into his night, his camera picked up pretty but rather demure purple hues in the sky, which appeared just as a white haze to the naked eye.

Then, within 30 seconds at around 11 p.m., the sky lit up with vibrant red and yellow streaks visible to the naked eye. Forister sprinted up a hill with his camera and pushed through bushes that scratched and tore up his legs, but "it didn't matter," he said. "It was so exciting."

"You just step back and jaw drop and just watch the show for a few minutes," Forister said. "It was really remarkable, like the kind of show that will make you stop and just catch your breath."

Late on Monday, March 13, the Sun blasted out a coronal mass ejection (CME) traveling at at least 3,000 kilometers per second (6,700,000 miles per hour), possibly the fastest ever recorded. The expelled particles reached the Earth's orbit in less than a day. Had they hit the Earth, the results could have been catastrophic, but fortunately the CME was directed almost directly opposite. However, the explosion is a reminder the next time we may not be so lucky.


Despite coming from the far side of the Sun, it appears the event has caused a minor radiation storm on Earth. A smaller, and much slower, CME on Saturday that was predicted to graze the Earth may have also contributed. CMEs can affect each other, with one clearing a path for the charged particles from another. Spaceweather.com predicts shortwave radio failures for planes flying over the poles.

A Wolf-Rayet star is a rare prelude to the famous final act of a massive star: the supernova. As one of its first observations in 2022, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope captured the Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 in unprecedented detail.

A distinctive halo of gas and dust frames the star and glows in the infrared light detected by Webb, displaying knotty structure and a history of episodic ejections. Despite being the scene of an impending stellar 'death', astronomers also look to Wolf-Rayet stars for insight into new beginnings. Cosmic dust is forming in the turbulent nebulas surrounding these stars, dust that is composed of the heavy-element building blocks of the modern Universe, including life on Earth.
The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star — among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly-detectable stars known — was one of the first observations made by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb shows the star WR 124 in unprecedented detail with its powerful infrared instruments. The star is 15 000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

"We are seeing emissions from the shockwaves in the largest structures in the universe."
Scientists have discovered the first evidence of shockwaves rippling through the "cosmic web," a massive network of interweaving filaments that represents the largest structure in the universe.

The discovery represents tantalizing evidence of magnetic fields weaving through the gas, dust, and dark matter tendrils which link galaxies together.

Scientists first began to think that on the largest scales, the universe is ordered in a web-like pattern with filaments that cross vast voids in space and pull galaxies into clusters in the 1960s. Two decades later using computer modeling, researchers were able to determine what this vast universal network might look like for the first time.

Astronomers have since mapped the cosmic web with actual observations in the process answering questions about its structure. One element has remained frustratingly shrouded in mystery, however: The magnetic fields that may run throughout the cosmic web.

Triangles, spheres, boomerangs, and fireballs.

For decades, people have reported seeing UFOs of all shapes and sizes in the skies over Southwestern Ontario. Since 1991, Winnipeg-based Ufology Research has recorded 153 UFO sightings in Windsor and Essex County, including five in 2022. There have been 328 sightings since 1989 in the London region, including six last year.

Chris Rutkowski, a writer and researcher with Ufology Research, said those sightings likely weren't alien-related. Of course, there's no way to know for sure.

"We've always been interested in the possibility of, 'are we alone in the universe?' " said Rutkowski, who has been investigating UFOs since the 1970s. "Are there other creatures like us or intelligent beings? We try to put our own lives in some perspective. There's a little bit of saviour mentality. Maybe the aliens can help figure a way out of the mess that we've made of Earth. If they've travelled all around the galaxy, maybe they're much more intelligent and have learned some of the lessons we still have to learn. So there's a little bit of that. But I think it's more we just want to know. Some reassurance that we're not alone."

Ufology Research has recorded 24,000 separate Canadian cases of UFOs, also called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), since it started collecting and analyzing data in 1989. There were 768 recorded UFO sightings across Canada in 2022.

In January 2022, a person in Windsor saw a "huge V-shaped formation of lights" fly over them before vanishing. In September, someone in Windsor saw an object that looked like "a big pill with lights all over the bottom." The last reported local sighting in 2022, described as some "stationary" and "vertical" comets, was on Dec. 21 in Essex.

The tattered shell of the first-ever historically recorded supernova was captured by the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera, which is mounted on the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab. RCW 86's ring of debris is all that remains of a white-dwarf star that exploded more than 1800 years ago, when it was recorded by Chinese stargazers as a 'guest star.'

Draped around the outer edges of this star-filled image are wispy tendrils that appear to be flying away from a central point, like the tattered remains of a burst balloon. These cloud-like features are thought to be the glowing remains of a supernova that was witnessed by Chinese astronomers in the year 185 C.E. When it appeared, this baffling addition to the night sky was referred to as a 'guest star' by ancient astronomers. It remained visible to the naked eye for about eight months before fading from view.

This historical supernova, which astronomers now refer to as SN 185, occurred more than 8000 light-years away in the approximate direction of Alpha Centauri, between the constellations of Circinus and Centaurus. The resulting structure, RCW 86 — as imaged by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab — helps shed light on how the remains of the supernova evolved over the past 1800 years. DECam's amazing wide-field vision enabled astronomers to create this rare view of the entire supernova remnant as it is seen today.

Though the link between RCW 86 and SN 185 is now well established, that wasn't always the case. For decades, astronomers thought it would take about 10,000 years for a traditional core-collapse supernova — one in which a massive star blows material away from itself by exploding — to form the structure as we see it today. This would make the structure far older than the supernova observed in the year 185.

A powerful solar storm that swept across Earth on Monday (Feb. 27) forced SpaceX to delay a Starlink launch from Florida and temporarily disrupted operations of several Canadian oil rigs as GPS signals were too inaccurate.

SpaceX eventually launched those satellites, the first batch of 21 second-generation Starlink internet spacecraft, at 6:13 p.m. ET (2313 GMT) on Monday after the geomagnetic storm, classified by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a strong G3 storm subsided. Liftoff occurred about 4.5 hours after the originally scheduled launch time.

SpaceX has been cooperating with NOAA since a mishap in February last year, which saw the company lose a batch of 40 satellites after launching them right into a relatively mild geomagnetic storm.

While the North Island deals with the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, a different kind of "incredibly powerful" storm has taken hold of the South.

A recent solar storm has been sending particles our way, sparking stunning aurora at the poles.

"It was a really powerful explosion, and that gas is now interacting with our magnetic field and making it ring and making our atmosphere glow," Otago Museum director Dr Ian Griffin told RNZ on Tuesday.

The Aurora Australis, also known as the Southern Lights, could be seen right across the South Island, he said.