Astronomers noticed the brightest flash of light ever, an explosion of 18,000,000,000 volts from an event that occurred 2.4 billion light-years from Earth, RT reports.
Experts believe that the flash was most likely caused by the formation of a black hole.
A gamma-ray burst – the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation – was first detected by orbiting telescopes on October 9, and its subsequent glow is still monitored by scientists around the world.
“It really breaks records, both in the amount of photons and the energy of the photons that reach us,” said Brendan O’Connor, who used the infrared instruments on the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
O’Connor said gamma-ray bursts lasting hundreds of seconds, as happened on Sunday, are believed to be caused by the dying stars of massive stars 30 times larger than our sun.
The star explodes into a supernova, collapses into a black hole, then material forms in a disk around the black hole, falls inside, and is released in a jet of energy traveling at 99.99% of the speed of light.
The flash (senna) released photons carrying 18 TeV of energy – 18 with 12 zeros behind – and affected long-wave radio communications in the Earth’s ionosphere.
“Gamma-ray bursts generally release within a few seconds the same amount of energy that our Sun produces over its lifetime – and this event is the brightest gamma-ray burst,” O’Connor said.
The gamma ray burst, known as GRB 221009A, was first detected by telescopes including NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, Neil Gehrells Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft on Sunday morning ET.
It originated from the direction of the constellation Sagitta, and has traveled an estimated 1.9 billion years to reach Earth – less than the current distance to its starting point, because the universe is expanding.
And watching the event now is like watching a 1.9 billion-year-old record of those events unfold in front of us, giving astronomers a rare opportunity to gain new insights into things like the formation of black holes.
“That’s what makes this kind of science so addictive – you get an adrenaline rush when these things happen,” said O’Connor, who is affiliated with the University of Maryland and George Washington University.
Over the coming weeks, he and others will continue to monitor supernova signals at optical and infrared wavelengths, to confirm that their hypothesis about the origins of the flash is correct, and that the event is consistent with known physics.
It is also expected that supernova explosions are responsible for the production of heavy elements – such as gold, platinum and uranium – and astronomers will also be looking for their signatures.
Astrophysicists have written in the past that the sheer force of gamma-ray bursts can cause extinction-level events here on Earth.
But O’Connor noted that because bursts of energy are so intensely focused and unlikely to appear in our galaxy, this scenario is not something we should worry too much about.