Gamma Ray Bursts tagged posts

An international team of 23 researchers led by Maria Dainotti, Assistant Professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), has analyzed archive data for powerful cosmic explosions from the deaths of stars and found a new way to measure distances in the distant Universe.

With no landmarks in space, it is very difficult to get a sense of depth. One technique astronomers use is to look for “standard candles,” objects or events where the underlying physics dictate that the absolute brightness (what you would see if you were right next to it) is always the same...

Artist’s illustration of a gamma-ray burst. Energy from the explosion is beamed into two narrow, oppositely directed jets. Credit: NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones

Sometimes when a star collapses into a supernova, it releases gamma-ray bursts GRBs which last just a few seconds, but during that time they can release as much energy as the Sun will produce in its entire lifetime. They are so intense that, if pointed at the Earth from even the most distant edge of our galaxy, they could easily cause a mass extinction. It’s thought that a gamma-ray burst may have caused the Ordovician extinction around 440 million years ago, which wiped out 85% of all species at the time.

Clearly, the farther away a planet is from gamma-ray bursts, the better its chances of harboring advanced for...

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) – flashes of high-energy light occur about once a day, randomly, from around the sky – the brightest events in the known universe. While a burst is underway, it is many millions of times brighter than an entire galaxy. Astronomers are anxious to decipher their nature not only because of their dramatic energetics, but also because their tremendous brightness enables them to be seen across cosmological distances and times, providing windows into the young universe.

GRB 130427A tops the charts as one of the brightest ever seen.
There appear to be 2 general types of GRBs: those associated with the deaths of massive stars, and ones believed to originate from the coalescence of 2 extreme objects (neutron stars or black holes) that had been orbiting each other in a binary...