In the process of monitoring a dying star, scientists discovered something bizarre and far more terrifying, simultaneously dazzling many astronomical observation systems.
According to Science Alert, the mysterious signal comes from a galaxy more than 1 billion light-years away and could change humanity’s understanding of the most powerful explosive events in the universe.
In a serendipitous discovery, a team of scientists led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) received a “shock” from the universe in the form of an ultra-powerful, ultra-bright gamma-ray burst lasting 50 seconds.
Graphic depicting a kilonova created from the collision of two neutron stars – (Image: Dreamstime).
According to Sci-News, this mysterious cosmic ray – named GRB 211211A – struck simultaneously at three powerful astronomical observatories around the world, including two ground-based facilities: Gemini North Observatory (located in Hawaii), NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and one operational orbital facility, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) typically come in two types. Long GRBs, lasting from a few seconds to about a minute, occur when a star with a mass at least ten times that of our Sun explodes as a supernova. Short GRBs, lasting less than 2 seconds, happen when two compact, powerful objects – such as two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole – collide to form a kilonova.
However, the 50-second GRB they observed – named GRB 211211A – is not a supernova but a completely different neutron star collision, never before seen in the universe, according to Dr. Chris Fryer, an astrophysicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“Our modeling team compared the observations with a supernova and kilonova simulation, and we could not convincingly match the signal with the supernova model, while some kilonova models produced good matches between the optical and infrared data points,” explained Dr. Ryan Wollaeger, also from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The research indicates that this is a special neutron star collision in which the two “corpses” merged into a “strange hybrid monster” with super energy.
A single neutron star – the remnant of massive stars that have exhausted their energy and collapsed – is already one of the most terrifying objects in the universe, with magnetic fields potentially hundreds of thousands to millions of times stronger than that of Earth.
“This discovery pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limit,” the authors stated. They have written two scientific reports about the “hybrid monster” and the gamma rays from it, both recently published in the scientific journal Nature.
