Astronomers Detect Series of Gamma-Ray Bursts "The Strongest Cosmic Explosions"

SadaNews - Astronomers have detected a series of gamma-ray bursts, which are considered the strongest explosions in the universe, coming from the same source in a phenomenon that has never been observed before and cannot be explained by any scenario, as announced by the European Southern Observatory.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are flashes of high-energy radiation that occur during extremely violent events, such as the death of massive stars in powerful explosions or their destruction by black holes. They usually last from a few milliseconds to several minutes, during which time they can release energy equivalent to that of several billion billions of suns.

Antonio Martin-Carrillo, an astronomer at University College Dublin in Ireland, stated in a European Southern Observatory announcement that theoretically, "gamma-ray bursts never recur because the event that produces them is destructive."

Martin-Carrillo, who contributed to a study on this topic published in "The Astrophysical Journal Letters," pointed out that this makes the signal detected by scientific circles this summer "different from any signal detected over the past fifty years."

The first alert was issued on July 2nd by NASA's Fermi Space Telescope, which did not observe just one flash but three from the same source within a few hours.

Scientists later discovered that this source had been active about a day earlier, based on data collected by the Einstein Probe, a space telescope for X-rays operated by China in collaboration with the European Space Agency and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

The signal lasted "100 to 1000 times" longer than most gamma-ray bursts, according to Andrew Levan, an astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands who contributed to the study.

Initially, astronomers believed that the gamma-ray burst originated within the Milky Way galaxy.

However, observations conducted using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile provided evidence that the source might have come from another galaxy, a hypothesis confirmed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The host galaxy may be a few billion light-years away, indicating that the strength of the event was significant.

The nature of the event that produced the signal remains unknown. One potential scenario is an unusual collapse of a very massive star.

Another hypothesis is that an unusual star was destroyed by an even stranger black hole.