NASA says the largest gamma-ray burst ever seen was the self-destruction of antimatter

A gamma-ray burst (GRB) observed by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on October 9, 2022, It may be the most intense emission captured since the Big Bang. A recent study published in the journal Science details the event and the implications of this discovery.

This powerful record was soon nicknamed BOAT, the English initials meaning “the brightest of all time.”. “When I first saw this sign, I got goosebumps,” said lead researcher Maria Edvige Ravasio of Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. “Our analysis since then has shown that First high-confidence emission line ever seen in 50 years of studying GRBs“.

In the study, scientists suggest that BOAT, catalogued as GRB 221009A, was emitted as a result of a supernova explosion.. The catastrophic event, which occurred when a massive star about 2.4 million light-years away from Earth died and collapsed, also points to the likely formation of a black hole where the star once was.

What did the Fermi telescope find in BOAT?

That date is October 9, BOAT’s light was so intense that it saturated most of the orbiting gamma-ray detectorsThis prevented the explosion’s power from being measured at its peak. But five minutes later, BOAT went dark, and the gamma-ray telescope observed a “putative emission line,” a feature of the light spectrum that suggests the presence of a particular element or compound.

What telescopes like Fermi see are jets of matter “flowing” into the black hole, being redirected, and pointed directly at Earth. Traveling at 99.9% the speed of light, these blasts are so powerful that if they occurred within a few thousand light-years of our planet, they could disrupt or destroy the atmosphere, extinguishing life there.

The emission line Fermi saw in BOAT’s light lasted only 40 seconds but reached a peak energy of 12 million electron volts (MeV), indicating an extremely high amount of energy, says co-author Om Sharan Salafia of the INAF-Brera Observatory in Milan. because most of the light sources we see on Earth emit photons between 2 and 3 eV.

Why was this GRB so energetic?

In the new study, the authors interpret this intensity as a “blue-shifted spectral line” It is produced by the annihilation of electron-positron pairs in the same location, which is potentially responsible for the emission of the brightest GRB pulses.“They explained that since every matter has its own antimatter counterpart, what is seen may be the energy resulting from the encounter of these opposite particles.

When these particles annihilate each other, they produce a pair of gamma rays with an energy of 0.511 MeV, explains another study author, Gor Oganesyan, of the Gran Sasso Institute of Science in L’Aquila, Italy.

“As I looked inside the jet, Where matter moves at a speed close to the speed of lightThis emission is significantly blue-shifted and pushed towards much higher energies, the astrophysicist notes.

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