Scientists may finally know what made the biggest explosion within the universe ever seen by humankind so powerful.
Astronomers have discovered that the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever seen had a singular jet structure and was dragging an unusually great amount of stellar material together with it.
This might explain the acute properties of the burst, believed to have been launched when a large star situated around 2.4 billion light-years from Earth within the direction of the constellation Sagitta underwent total gravitational collapse to birth a black hole, in addition to why its afterglow endured for therefore long.
The GRB officially designated GRB 221009A but nicknamed the BOAT, or the brightest of all time, was spotted on October 9, 2023, and stood out from other GRBs resulting from its extreme nature. It was seen as an immensely vivid flash of high-energy gamma-rays, followed by a low-fading afterglow across many wavelengths of sunshine.
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“GRB 221009A represents a large step forward in our understanding of gamma-ray bursts and demonstrates that probably the most extreme explosions don’t obey the usual physics assumed for garden variety gamma-ray bursts,” George Washington University researcher and study lead writer Brendan O’Connor said in an announcement. O’Connor led a team that continued to observe the BOAT GRB with the Gemini South Telescope in Chile following its initial discovery in Oct 2023.
Northwestern University doctoral candidate Jillian Rastinejad, who was also a part of a team that observed the BOAT on Oct. 14 after its initial discovery, told Live Science that GRB 221009A is regarded as brighter than other highly energetic GRBs by an element of a minimum of 10.
“Photons have been detected from this GRB that has more energy than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces,” she said.
Even before the BOAT was spotted, GRBs were already considered probably the most powerful, violent, and energetic explosions within the universe, able to blasting out as much energy in a matter of seconds because the sun will produce over its entire around ten billion-year lifetime. There are two kinds of these blasts, long-duration, and short-duration, which may need different launch mechanisms, each leading to the creation of a black hole.
Further examination of the powerful GRB has revealed that it is exclusive for its structure in addition to its brightness. The GRB was surprisingly wide. So wide, actually, that astronomers were initially unable to see its edges.
“Our work clearly shows that the GRB had a singular structure, with observations regularly revealing a narrow jet embedded inside a wider gas outflow where an isolated jet would normally be expected,” co-author and Department of Physics on the University of Bath scientist Hendrik Van Eerten said in an announcement.
Thus, the jet of GRB 221009A appears to own each wide and narrow “wings” that differentiate it from the jets of other GRBs. This might explain why the afterglow of the BOAT continued to be seen by astronomers in multiple wavelengths for months after its initial discovery.
Van Eerten and the team have a theory as to what gives the jet of the BOAT its unique structure.
“GRB jets have to undergo the collapsing star by which they’re formed,” he said. “What we predict made the difference on this case was the quantity of blending that happened between the stellar material and the jet, such that shock-heated gas kept appearing in our line of sight all the way in which as much as the purpose that any characteristic jet signature would have been lost in the general emission from the afterglow.”
Van Eerten also points out the findings could help understand not only the BOAT but additionally other incredibly vivid GRBs.
“GRB 221009A is perhaps the equivalent of the Rosetta stone of long GRBs, forcing us to revise our standard theories of how relativistic outflows are formed in collapsing massive stars,” O’Connor added.
The invention will potentially lay the muse for future research into GRBs as scientists try to unlock the mysteries still surrounding these powerful bursts of energy. The findings could also help physicists higher model the structure of GRB jets.
“For a very long time, we have now considered jets as being shaped like ice cream cones,” study co-author and George Washington University associate professor of physics Alexander van der Horst said. “Nevertheless, some gamma-ray bursts lately, and particularly the work presented here, show that we’d like more complex models and detailed computer simulations of gamma-ray burst jets.”
The team’s research is detailed in a paper published within the journal Science Advances.
