Beams from brightest gamma ray burst ever seen were pointed directly at Earth
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever detected yet, codenamed GRB 221009A, has a strange structure that astronomers have never seen before.
On 9 October 2022, high-energy monitoring space satellites detected an extremely bright gamma-ray signal that suddenly exploded from the constellation of Sagitta; it lasted hundreds of seconds. The burst was later determined to be the most energetic flare observed by gamma-ray observatories, and is over a magnitude brighter than previous record breakers.
O'Connor and his colleagues found that the jets emitted from the event – they estimated humans' chance to observe a similar event would come around only once in 1,000 years – have an odd shape with no clear edge, unlike other gamma-ray bursts. GRB 221009A is described as having a narrow core with wide sloping wings, whereas other similar bursts are shaped more like ice cream cones.
Part of the reason why the explosion is so bright is because the beams were directly pointed at Earth, according to Hendrik Van Eerten, co-author of the paper and a researcher at the University of Bath. Van Eertenit as"much like a garden hose angled to spray straight at you." But that alone isn't enough to explain why it's so bright, and its properties don't seem to fit observations for most predictive models.
"The combination of extreme gamma-ray brightness and never-ending afterglow is fatal for most models because it creates an energy crisis," Eleonora Troja, lead author of the paper and an associate professor at the University of Rome, explained to us."Using standard theories we were faced with a serious problem: this burst was a hundred times more powerful than what we could possibly explain.
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