SPACE NEWS
Brightest ever gamma ray burst: check out the universe’s BOAT
An explosion about 2.4 billion light years away from Earth has been seen by astronomers, one they’re calling the brightest of all time.
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We have become rather accustomed to debates, sometimes heated, over who is the greatest of all time (shortened to GOAT) in either their specific sport or across all the disciplines. Well, you may be interested to hear that the term is not only used to refer to the sporting world, but also extends to fields of science, in this case, astronomy.
Forget sporting GOATs, this is the BOAT of the known universe
Instead of greatest star or planet here -- there are quite a few billion battling it out for that title -- astronomers have highlighted the greatest burst of light ever seen. This has been neatly dubbed BOAT, the brightest of all time.
As reported by Leah Crane for New Scientist, on 9 October a gamma ray burst, known as GRB221009A, was spotted by star gazers, and they are saying that even its afterglow is brighter than most objects in the sky. They do not expect to see another with the same level of brightness for around another 1,000 years. Jillian Rastinejad at Northwestern University in Illinois explains.
“If we look at all of the gamma ray bursts that have been detected, this one stands apart. Informally, we’ve been calling it the BOAT – the brightest of all time.”
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Unlike those star names I mentioned at the top of this article, despite the many lenses focused on this GRB (of the telescope rather than the camera variety), some of the details of its shining performance are sketchy. For example, we don’t know exactly how bright the explosion was, due to the fact that, well, it was so bright that it saturated the detectors of gamma-ray telescopes.
A colleague of Rastinejad, Andrew Levan at Radboud University in the Netherlands, explains that “if you had gamma-ray eyes, you’d be blinded,” and thus we are left with completely white pixels with no detail. It may be months though until we get a real insight into what happened.
The experts give us some context to the power of this gamma ray burst, putting the energy released across the lifetime of our Sun at about 10^51 ergs and this explosion at between 10^54 and 10^55 ergs.
That’s certainly an impressive performance.