Gamma radiation comes from some types of particle collisions.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, CHILE – The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory of the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) observed for thousands of years in September 2021 when it saw a dramatic explosion, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) explode in the sky. universe Start. The object now known as GRB210905A looks like it did when the universe was young because its light took 12.8 billion years to reach Earth.
Due to the intense light of the explosion gamma rays fading rapidly, as did the rest of the light, astronomers were quick to capture what was left, which appeared as a red-orange dot, with several instruments on the very large telescope of the Southern European Observatory in Chile, including its X spectrograph. -Shooter, as well as robotic telescopes at the La Silla Observatory also in Cilem, according to a statement by the institute.
Reported by Space, On Wednesday (10/19/2022), gamma radiation comes from some types of particle collisions and the nuclear decay of radioactive substances (which is one of the reasons nuclear waste is so dangerous). Astronomers think these powerful bursts of electromagnetic light flash in the darkness of space at least once a day, and that GRBs are some of the brightest phenomena out there, but they don’t last long.
Although the GRBs are visible, astronomers are careful to measure how much light the explosion emits at different wavelengths. Like all light sources in space, as the wavelength of light extends through vacuum, the GRB signal moves into the red part of the spectrum. How much the signal changes, called redshift, reflects how far away the source is, with very distant signals that are often infrared light.
While the human eye cannot see infrared light, instruments like the X-Shooter can, and this is how researchers know the distance of these objects and the time it takes for their light to reach Earth. Such distant objects are generally difficult to observe because they are often faint, but gamma-ray bursts such as GRB210905A are very bright and will appear if captured and represented quickly enough.
“Gamma-ray burst [sejauh ini] they are rare events … but they are only a small part of the wider population that the proposed future missions promise to discover “, wrote the group leader Andrea Rossi, astronomer of INAF Bologna in Italy, and his colleagues in a study on the observations published on September 21 in Astronomy and Astrophysics magazine.
So where does this mysterious burst of light come from? The researchers believe that the GRB received a bright blast from the material dragged by the black hole’s giant gravity. Scientists ruled out the possibility that the signal came from a magnetar, the very dense dead core of a massive star with enormous magnetic energy, because GRB210905A has too much energy to be handled by the magnetar.
The more you explain gamma-ray bursts, the more you can reveal what the universe was like when it was young.
