NASA's tiny BurstCube mission launches to study cosmic blasts
NASA's BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite designed to study the universe's most powerful explosions, is on its way to the International Space Station.
NASA's BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite designed to study the universe's most powerful explosions, is on its way to the International Space Station.
Astronomy
Mar 22, 2024
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The most powerful events in the known universe—gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)—are short-lived outbursts of the highest-energy light. They can erupt with a quintillion (a 10 followed by 18 zeros) times the luminosity of our sun. ...
Astronomy
Feb 7, 2024
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The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is something special among telescopes. It's not built for better angular resolution and increased resolving power like the European Extremely Large Telescope or the Giant Magellan Telescope. ...
Astronomy
Jan 23, 2024
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India launched its first satellite on Monday to study black holes as it seeks to deepen its space exploration efforts ahead of an ambitious crewed mission next year.
Astronomy
Jan 2, 2024
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Neutron stars are the end products of massive stars and gather together a large part of the original stellar mass in a super-dense star with a diameter of only around ten kilometers. On 17 August 2017, researchers observed ...
Astronomy
Dec 21, 2023
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The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, operated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), located at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, is one of the most ambitious neutrino observatories in the world. ...
General Physics
Dec 18, 2023
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Scientists and engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have completed testing for BurstCube, a shoebox-sized spacecraft designed to study the universe's most powerful explosions. Members of ...
Astronomy
Dec 18, 2023
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Astronomers with The LHAASO Collaboration have found that last year's GRB 221009A gamma-ray burst, subsequently nicknamed the Brightest of All Time (BOAT), carried with it 13 teraelectronvolts of energy. In their study, reported ...
Last year the brightest flash of light ever seen in the night sky disturbed Earth's upper atmosphere in a way that has never before detected before, researchers said on Tuesday.
Astronomy
Nov 14, 2023
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Scientists have observed the creation of rare chemical elements in the second-brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen—casting new light on how heavy elements are made.
Astronomy
Oct 25, 2023
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Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are flashes of gamma rays associated with extremely energetic explosions in distant galaxies. They are the most luminous electromagnetic events occurring in the universe. Bursts can last from milliseconds to nearly an hour, although a typical burst lasts a few seconds. The initial burst is usually followed by a longer-lived "afterglow" emitting at longer wavelengths (X-ray, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio).
Most observed GRBs are believed to be a narrow beam of intense radiation released during a supernova event, as a rapidly rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a black hole. A subclass of GRBs (the "short" bursts) appear to originate from a different process, possibly the merger of binary neutron stars.
The sources of most GRBs are billions of light years away from Earth, implying that the explosions are both extremely energetic (a typical burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10 billion year lifetime) and extremely rare (a few per galaxy per million years). All observed GRBs have originated from outside the Milky Way galaxy, although a related class of phenomena, soft gamma repeater flares, are associated with magnetars within the Milky Way. It has been hypothesized that a gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way could cause a mass extinction on Earth.
GRBs were first detected in 1967 by the Vela satellites, a series of satellites designed to detect covert nuclear weapons tests. Hundreds of theoretical models were proposed to explain these bursts in the years following their discovery, such as collisions between comets and neutron stars. Little information was available to verify these models until the 1997 detection of the first X-ray and optical afterglows and direct measurement of their redshifts using optical spectroscopy. These discoveries, and subsequent studies of the galaxies and supernovae associated with the bursts, clarified the distance and luminosity of GRBs, definitively placing them in distant galaxies and connecting long GRBs with the deaths of massive stars.
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