We may finally know what caused the biggest cosmic explosion ever seen
The gamma ray burst known as GRB221009A is the biggest explosion astronomers have ever glimpsed and we might finally know what caused the blast
By Alex Wilkins
25 July 2024
Huge stars collapsing or colliding create gamma ray bursts
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/ A. Simonnet, Sonoma State University
The most powerful explosion astronomers have ever seen contains a mysterious signal thought impossible to exist. That signal gives us our first detailed look inside a gamma ray burst and suggests that they involve the annihilation of matter and antimatter.
Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful blasts of radiation in the universe, and are generated in cosmic explosions and collisions. Physicists suspect that the highest energy GRBs come from stars collapsing and forming a black hole. The black hole then produces a jet of material, moving at close to the speed of light, that pierces through the failing star and sends out blasts of radiation that we can observe on Earth. But exactly how this radiation is produced, or what the jet might contain, remains unknown.
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Much of this mystery comes from the spectrum of light that we can see. Unlike the light that we observe from other objects in the universe, which contains distinctive spikes that can tell us about the specific atoms or other matter that produced this burst of energy, the spectrum of light from gamma ray bursts always appears to be smooth and featureless.
In the 1990s, researchers became excited at the prospect that some GRBs appeared to show distinct lines, but after careful analyses they found these were statistical errors and concluded that GRB spectra couldn’t be spiky.
Now, Maria Ravasio at Radboud University in the Netherlands and her colleagues have discovered that GRB221009A, discovered in 2022 and the brightest explosion ever observed, in fact contains an energetic peak at about 10 megaelectronvolts.
