Astronomers have spotted the brightest flash of light ever, an explosion of 18,000,000,000 volts from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light years from Earth, reports RT.
Experts believe the lightning was most likely caused by the formation of a black hole.
A gamma-ray burst – the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation – was first detected by orbiting telescopes on October 9, and its subsequent flare is still monitored by scientists around the world.
“It really breaks records, both for the amount of photons and the energy of the photons that reach us,” said Brendan O’Connor, who used infrared instruments on the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
O’Connor said the gamma-ray bursts lasting hundreds of seconds, as happened on Sunday, are believed to be caused by the dying stars of massive stars 30 times larger than our sun.
The star explodes in a supernova, collapses into a black hole, then the material forms in a disk around the black hole, falls inside, and is released in a jet of energy that travels at 99.99% of the speed of light.
The flash (senna) released photons carrying 18 TeV of energy – 18 with 12 zeros behind it – and affected long-wave radio communications in the Earth’s ionosphere.
“Gamma-ray bursts generally release the same amount of energy in seconds that our Sun produces over its lifetime – and this event is the brightest gamma-ray burst,” O’Connor said.
The gamma-ray burst, known as GRB 221009A, was first detected by telescopes including NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray space telescope, Neil Gehrells’ Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft Sunday morning ET.
It originated from the direction of the Sagitta constellation and traveled about 1.9 billion years to reach Earth, less than the current distance from its starting point, because the universe is expanding.
And watching the event now is like watching a 1.9 billion-year record of those events unfolding before us, giving astronomers a rare opportunity to gain new insights into things like black hole formation.
“This is what makes this kind of science so compelling – you get an adrenaline rush when these things happen,” said O’Connor, an affiliate of the University of Maryland and George Washington University.
In the coming weeks, he and others will continue to monitor supernova signals at optical and infrared wavelengths, to confirm that their hypothesis about the lightning’s origin is correct and that the event is consistent with known physics.
Supernova explosions are also expected to be responsible for producing heavy elements – such as gold, platinum and uranium – and astronomers will also be looking for their signatures.
Astrophysicists have written in the past that the sheer force of gamma-ray bursts can cause extinction-level events here on Earth.
But O’Connor pointed out that because the bursts of energy are so intensely concentrated and unlikely to appear in our galaxy, this scenario isn’t something we should worry too much about.
