The gamma-ray burst ever more energy and long view - La Vanguardia

MORE INFORMATION

• black holes ‘swallow’ but also ‘indigestion’
• The black hole of the Milky Way suffered an explosion two million years ago
• ‘cosmic blast’ hit Earth in s. VIII
• Star induces another to death and creates a black hole

Washington. (Reuters) -. U.S. Space Agency (NASA ) has captured the explosion more energy gamma rays and lasting ever observed and image analysis has allowed astronomers establish a new theory on the operation of such phenomena.

gamma-ray bursts, which occur when a star collapses and dies, leading to a black hole and brings a stream of particles traveling at the speed of light, are the most luminous phenomena that occur in the universe, but can not predict.

April 27 explosion of such a “monstrous” dimensions was, he assured the director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA, Paul Hertz, at a press conference.

“Something like this only happens once a century,” said Hertz.

explosion, GRB 130427A has been called, was detected for three NASA satellites, in addition to several telescopes on Earth, and as a result of these observations have been published four scientific papers in the journal “Science “and another in” The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “

Although astronomers think that the explosion occurred almost 4,000 million years ago and could last for a few minutes, the observation lasted 20 hours, much longer than previous detected.
Moments after being the gamma-ray burst, located Fermi gamma-ray peak of 95 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which makes the light from a more energetic explosion.

However, telescopes of Los Alamos (New Mexico) caught a flash that reached magnitude 7 on the astronomical brightness scale, the second brightest of which there are records.

relationship between visible light and energy of the gamma rays that caused it posed a problem for astronomers.

“We thought that the visible light from the flashes came from internal shocks, but shows that this explosion must come from external shocks, which produce more energy gamma rays,” said Sylvia Zhu, University of Maryland, a member of the team Fermi.

Earth can rarely see death stars, because the atmosphere darkens, although the 27 April was so great that we observed with binoculars.

NASA scientists claimed that the Earth suffered the effects of gamma-ray bursts like millions of years ago.

Anyway, astronomer Naval Research Laboratory Charles Dermer, co-author of the study, said it is “very unlikely” that a burst of gamma rays of this size reach Earth today.