What Causes Gamma-Ray Explosion? Their Ultrabright Light Helps Us to Recognize

In July 1967, at the end of the Cold War, American satellites set up to test Soviet nuclear weapons he found something he did not expect. The Vela 3 and 4 satellites observed a temporary glare of strong photons, or gamma rays, that appeared to be coming from space. Later, in 1973 paper which recorded more than a dozen spectacular events, astronomers could detect gamma-ray explosions. “Since then, we have been trying to understand what the explosion is,” he said Andrew Taylor, a scientist at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg.

After their first discovery, astronomers discussed the origin of gamma rays — the strongest sources of energy. Some think that such a bright spot must have been close to the sun. Some claimed that they were in our galaxy, while others claimed that they were in space. The views were numerous; The data did not.

Then in 1997, the Italian and Dutch satellite called BeppoSAX confirmed that the gamma explosion was extreme, sometimes starting billions of years later.

This discovery was astounding. To determine the brightness of these objects – even from a distance — astronomers realized that their motives must have been extremely powerful. Sylvia Zhu, an astronomer at DESY, said: “We thought there was no way you could get so much energy to explode from anything in the universe.”

A gamma-ray explosion emits the same power as a supernova, which occurs when a star falls and explodes, but in seconds or minutes rather than weeks. Their brightest galaxies may be 100 billion times brighter than our sun, and a billion times brighter than even the brightest stars.

It turned out he was lucky that he was so far away. “If there was a gamma explosion in our galaxy and pointed the plane at us, the best thing you can expect is a quick crash,” Zhu said. “You would expect the radiation to deplete into the ozone layer and then burn everything to death. Because of its high risk, it can cause nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere to form nitrous dioxide. The air can turn brown. It would be a slow death. ”

Gamma rays come in two colors, long and short. The former, which lasts up to a few minutes or so, is thought to come from the stars more than 20 times the size of our sun falling into black holes and exploding like supernovas. The latter, which is only about a second, is triggered by two interlocking stars (or possibly a neutron star connected to a black hole), which was confirmed in 2017 when the wavelength detector detected a combination of neutron star and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a gamma explosion.

Each time, the gamma explosion does not come as a result of the same explosion. Instead it comes from a plane that is moving at a slower pace than the speed of light emanating from a blast on the other side. (The real way to promote the airline is “a very important question,” says Zhu.)

“It’s the combination of speed at high power and the look in the aircraft that makes them so bright,” he said. @Alirezatalischioriginal, an astronomer at the University of Leicester in England. “This means we can see them from a distance.” In fact, it is thought to exist one explosion of gamma-ray in the everyday visible universe.

Until recently, the only way to study gamma rays was to observe them from space, since the earth’s ozone layer blocks gamma rays from reaching the surface. But when gamma rays enter our atmosphere, they fall into other areas. These objects are pushed faster than atmospheric pressure, which causes them to emit a blue light called Cherenkov’s rays. Scientists can analyze this blue eruption.