NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has captured what is described as the “energy peak” in the universe.
According to SciTech Daily, astronomers refer to this energy source as BOAT – the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has gathered data on an energy source more powerful than anything ever recorded – (Photo: NASA).
BOAT, previously known as GRB 221009A, exploded on October 9, 2022, and quickly saturated most gamma-ray detectors in orbit, including those on Fermi.
This means that even powerful tools like Fermi were unable to measure the most intense part of the energy explosion believed to be the brightest to appear in the Earth’s sky in 10,000 years.
Now, an international team of scientists has partially unraveled the mystery.
They focused on finding answers to the primary question: What caused this energy explosion?
The most plausible source is the annihilation of electrons and their antiparticles called positrons, according to co-author Gor Oganesyan from the Gran Sasso Science Institute and Gran Sasso National Laboratory (Italy).
“When an electron and a positron collide, they annihilate each other, producing a pair of gamma rays with an energy of 0.511 MeV,” Dr. Oganesyan explained.
If this explanation is correct, to generate an emission line peaking at 12 MeV, the annihilating particles would need to be moving towards us at a speed of about 99.9% the speed of light.
These parameters align well with the most common hypothesis that gamma-ray bursts are emitted from the death of supergiant stars.
Theoretically, supergiant stars that exhaust their fuel can collapse and form a rapidly rotating black hole.
Material falling into the black hole powers opposing jets of particles that penetrate the outer layers of the star at speeds close to that of light. We detect GRBs when one of these jets is directed almost directly towards Earth.
This theory has been around for a while, but there are still several aspects that scientists do not fully understand.
Thus, Fermi’s data on BOAT promises to provide further clues about the deadly energy explosions of massive stars.
It also indicates that NASA’s Fermi is capable of offering additional similar examples, should such energy bursts occur in the future.
