GRB 211211A tagged posts

NASA Missions Probe Game-Changing Cosmic Explosion

Two neutron stars begin to merge in this illustration, blasting a jet of high-speed particles and producing a cloud of debris. Scientists think these kinds of events are factories for a significant portion of the universe’s heavy elements, including gold.
Credits: A. Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

On Dec. 11, 2021, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a blast of high-energy light from the outskirts of a galaxy around 1 billion light-years away. The event has rattled scientists’ understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful events in the universe.

For the last few decades, astronomers have generally divided GRBs into two categories...

Read More