Huge gamma-ray blast spotted 12.2 bln light-years from earth

[brentaal]

Huge gamma-ray blast spotted 12.2 bln light-years from earth

WASHINGTON (AFP) ? The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.

The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

"Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.

"If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said.

A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.

The sun is eight light minutes from Earth, and Pluto is 12 light hours away.

Taking into account the huge distance from earth of the burst, scientists worked out that the blast was stronger than 9,000 supernovae -- powerful explosions that occur at the end of a star's lifetime -- and that the gas jets emitting the initial gamma rays moved at nearly the speed of light.

"This burst's tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date," a statement issued by the US Department of Energy said.

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions, which astronomers believe occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse.

Long bursts, which last more than two seconds, occur in massive stars that are undergoing collapse, while short bursts lasting less than two seconds occur in smaller stars.

In short gamma-ray bursts, stars simply explode and form supernovae, but in long bursts, the enormous bulk of the star leads its core to collapse and form a blackhole, into which the rest of the star falls.

As the star's core collapses into the black hole, jets of material blast outward, boring through the collapsing star and continuing into space where they interact with gas previously shed by the star, generating bright afterglows that fade with time.

"It's thought that something involved in spinning up and collapsing into that blackhole in the center is what drives these jets. No one really has figured that out. The jets rip through the star and the supernova follows after the jets," Reddy said.

Studying gamma-ray bursts allows scientists to "sample an individual star at a distance where we can't even see galaxies clearly," Reddy said.

Observing the massive explosions could also lift the veil on more of space's enigmas, including those raised by the burst spotted by Fermi, such as a "curious time delay" between its highest and lowest energy emissions.

Such a time lag has been seen in only one earlier burst, and "may mean that the highest-energy emissions are coming from different parts of the jet or created through a different mechanism," said Stanford University physicist Peter Michelson, the chief investigator on Fermi's large area telescope.

"Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them. In a few years, we'll have a fairly good sample of bursts and may have some answers," Michelson said.

The Fermi telescope and NASA's Swift satellite detect "in the order of 1,000 gamma-ray bursts a year, or a burst every 100,000 years in a given galaxy," said Reddy.

Astrophysicists estimate there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope was developed by NASA in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and partners including academic institutions in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

Source

[guru]

isn't that too much mass/energy for a star ?

[Andrew Lyle Global Moderator]

I'm not the best at science... but how do you see 1.2 billion light years away?

[Sam Symons Veteran]

I'm not the best at science... but how do you see 1.2 billion light years away?

I like it how they use the word 'spotted' :p it makes it seem as if they just glanced in that direction and said, "damn, that's one big explosion".

[shockz]

I'm not the best at science... but how do you see 1.2 billion light years away?

I'm not sure how it works, but if a star is 1 light year away... it takes 1 year for that light to reach earth.

So did this explosion occur 12.2 bln years ago? if so that predates what scientists state is the creation of the universe.

Confusing.

[Quillz]

I'm not sure how it works, but if a star is 1 light year away... it takes 1 year for that light to reach earth.

So did this explosion occur 12.2 bln years ago... if so that predates what scientists state is the creation of the universe.

Confusing.

Not quite. Most scientists now believe the universe is somewhere between 13-14 billion years old. So, this explosion would have been one of the earliest (if not the earliest) gamma ray blasts, considering how old it is.

[+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹]

I'm not the best at science... but how do you see 1.2 billion light years away?

You see what happened 1.2 billion years ago

I'm not sure how it works, but if a star is 1 light year away... it takes 1 year for that light to reach earth.

So did this explosion occur 12.2 bln years ago? if so that predates what scientists state is the creation of the universe.

Confusing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

"Current theory and observations suggest that this is between 13.61 and 13.85 billion years.[1]"

[blackcat77]

So did this explosion occur 12.2 bln years ago... if so that predates what scientists state is the creation of the universe.

Latest guess is that the big bang was 14.7 billion years ago.

[Minimoose]

Latest guess is that the big bang was 14.7 billion years ago.

The predictions are slightly more complicated than guesses, I would guess ;)

Really interesting article :D

[wmoley2k]

That sounds cool! There's one bit of the article that doesn't seem right to me though. It says short bursts are when stars just explode as a supernova. The most common theory is that of a compact binary system (two neutron stars, or a neutron star and black hole) coalescing. This method also gives a mechanism for actually creating the gamma rays, which is material spiraling onto a compact core. The stars simply exploding doesn't as far as I can work out.

[MitchLeBlanc]

It's obviously God being created.

*giggles*

[SirEvan]

It's obviously God being created.

*giggles*

LOL nice....but you're wrong..god was created 2009 years ago.

[jonhapimp]

maybe a galaxy exploded or Zitoid the omniscient blew up something

[Guest MGS3_GrayFox]

maybe a galaxy exploded or Zitoid the omniscient blew up something

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes anniversary came up and Tom Cruise exploded of happiness.

[primexx]

You see what happened 1.2 billion years ago

not quite, since space is expanding the distance between the source and us when it was emitted is shorter than the distance when we observe it (i.e. now). I'm not sure if it makes it longer or shorter than 12.2 billion years ago (did they report 12.2 as the distance then or the distance now? don't know what they adjusted for) but it's not 12.2.

[Growled Member]

Who knows, that might have been the Big Bang.

[CL114C0777498D]

i guess an alien civilisation somewhere out there made their own hadron collider... :p