In October 2022, an extremely bright flash caught the attention of the Gemini South Telescope in Chile.was quickly identified as The brightest I’ve ever seenhence its nickname: The brightest (ship) ever.
Now, a team of researchers has examined the event with the Webb Space Telescope and concluded that the cause of the ship was a supernova: the explosive, glorious death of a star. The researchers also looked for heavy elements such as gold and platinum but saw no signs of them, leaving the question of their origins as open as ever.The team’s research is publish Today in Nature Astronomy.
Heavy elements are created by neutron star mergers—at least some of them. There is too much heavy matter in the universe for such stellar mergers to account for all of it. Even if two stars in a binary system explode, leaving behind the dense shells of neutron stars, “it could take billions of years for the two neutron stars to slowly move closer and eventually merge,” says Peter Blanchard .Northwestern University astronomer and lead author of the study, at the University release.
“But observations of very old stars suggest that parts of the universe were rich in heavy metals before most binary neutron stars had time to merge,” Blanchard added. “This points us to another channel.”
There are two types of gamma-ray bursts: long-duration and short-duration. Short bursts are associated with stellar mergers and black hole formation, According to NASA, while longer bursts are associated with stellar death. BOAT is firmly in the latter camp.
After detecting the ship, the team deliberately waited several months before turning the Webb telescope toward it. That’s because the explosion was so bright – and lasted so long – that they needed to wait for the event to subside before they could detect any signs of a supernova.
The team used the telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) to observe elements commonly found in supernovae. The signal wasn’t particularly bright, suggesting that the supernova that produced the brightest gamma-ray burst ever was not itself the most advanced.
“This event is particularly exciting because some have hypothesized that luminous gamma rays like those from ships Explosions can produce many heavy elements, such as gold and platinum.” Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian, in a press release. “If they are right, the ship should be a gold mine. Surprisingly, we don’t see any evidence of these heavy elements.”
Long gamma-ray bursts are gamma-ray bursts that last longer than two seconds. The boat lasted an astonishing 10 hours, According to Science News. But if we look at it from a technical perspective, The boat is not actually small boat. But it “may be the brightest burst of X-ray and gamma-ray energy to occur since the beginning of human civilization,” said Eric Burns, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University and co-author of the paper express. study Describe the signal.
A year after the signal, a scientific collaboration determined the ship emitted energetic gamma rays Reaching 13 teraelectronvolts——The same energy as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider during the second run.
Scientists continue to sift through the vast amounts of data generated by BOAT.Last June, a group reported The structure of the explosive jet, which could lead physicists to redesign their models of jet structure. Despite all the accolades, the ship wasn’t the biggest explosion ever seen in space. That title belongs to AT2021lwx, an event that erupted from a distant black hole and its surrounding gas cloud nearly 8 billion years ago.
When the next generation of observatories comes online, astronomers may see more explosions like it, just like the ship.One of the most talked about facilities is the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, which will use 3.2 billion pixel camera Collecting terabytes of data on the southern sky every night.
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