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A number of space and ground-based telescopes observed one of the brightest space explosions ever witnessed on October 9.
The dramatic event was classified as a Gamma-ray burst, or GRB, which is one of the most powerful known types of explosions in the universe, as per NASA.
It was so powerful that scientists were still able to observe the effects of the explosion, nicknamed grb 221009a, a few hours after its first detection. A group of scientists now call it the "brightest ever" or "BOAT" and it could be the most powerful cosmic explosion since the Big Bang.
A gamma-ray burst "unusually long".
Scientists think that the explosion was caused when a star, about 2.4 billion light-years from the constellation of Sagitta, collapsed and became a supernova before becoming a black hole. The star in question was likely many times larger than our Sun.
“The unusually long GRB 221009A is the most brilliant GRB ever registered, and its glow has broken every record at every wavelength," said O'Connor, a PhD candidate from the University of Maryland and George Washington University in Washington, DC, by way of a declaration.
“Because this burst is so bright and also nearby, we think this is a once-in-a-century opportunity to address some of the most fundamental questions regarding these explosions, from the formation of black holes to tests of dark matter models.”
When GRB 221009A's gamma rays and x-rays hit our solar system, They start by triggering sensors installed on space observatories, including the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray spacecraft, National Observatory Neil Gehrels Swift, and a ship called Wind. A few moments later, they hit ground telescopes such as the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
What does a gamma-ray burst look like?
A gamma burst is the most powerful and brilliant kind of explosion scientists have ever seen, which means that the 221009a grb is the brightest of the brightest. They only last a few seconds but, in the meantime, they emit as much energy as that produced by the stars as our sun does for the rest of their lives. They are supposed to happen while black holes are forming.
The very first gamma-ray burst observed by humans was detected in 1967 by a satellite of the American Air Force called vela. This satellite was designed for the detection of Russian nuclear tests. Instead, he picked up one of humanity's most dramatic sources of electromagnetic radiation.
The "Brightest Of All Time"
Though GRB 221009A occurred some 2.4 billion light-years away, it's relatively close in astronomical terms. This, in part, reports on its luminosity and the duration of the consequences of the explosion—the Fermi telescope, for example, detected the gust within 10 hours of first observation.
“In our research group, we’ve been referring to this burst as the "BOAT," or Brightest Of All Time, because when you look at the thousands of bursts gamma-ray telescopes have been detecting since the 1990s, this one stands apart,” Jillian Rastinejad, a doctoral student at Northwestern University in Illinois who led one of the teams using the Gemini South telescope, explained as per a CNN report.
The burst also allowed two devices aboard the International Space Station (ISS) — the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) X-ray telescope and Japan’s Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) — to work together for the first time to observe GRB 221009A three hours after it was detected. Observations from the many space and ground observatories at our disposal allow astronomers to analyze signatures of any heavy elements released by these space phenomena and learn about the massive reverberating effects of the explosions, including the generalized formation of massive black holes across the cosmos.
