ALMA creates its first-ever movie of cosmic explosion. In the blink of an eye, a massive star more than 2 billion light-years away lost a million-year-long fight against gravity and collapsed, triggering a supernova and forming a black hole at its center. This newborn black hole belched a fleeting yet astonishingly intense flash of gamma rays known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) toward Earth, where it was detected by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on 19 December 2016.
While the gamma rays from the burst disappeared from view a scant seven seconds later, longer wavelengths of light from the explosion – including X-ray, visible light, and radio – con...
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