In October 2022, an extremely bright flash caught the attention of the Gemini South telescope in Chile.It was quickly decided that brightest I’ve ever seenhence its nickname “The Brightest (Boat) of All Time”.
Now, a group of researchers has investigated this phenomenon with the Webb Space Telescope and concluded that the cause of BOAT is a supernova, the explosive and glorious death of a star. The researchers also looked for heavy elements such as gold and platinum, but found no sign of them, leaving questions about their origins as unanswered as before. The team’s research published Today we will talk about natural astronomy.
Heavy elements are produced by neutron star mergers, at least some of them. There is too much heavy material in the universe for such stellar mergers to explain it all. Even after the two stars in a binary system explode, leaving behind a dense shell of a neutron star, “it could take billions of years for the two neutron stars to gradually approach each other and eventually merge.” Peter Blanchard said.Astronomer at Northwestern University and lead author of the undergraduate study release.
“But observations of very old stars show that parts of the universe were rich in heavy metals before most binary neutron stars merged,” Blanchard added. “It’s showing us another channel.”
There are two types of gamma-ray bursts: long-duration and short-duration. Short bursts are associated with star mergers and black hole formation; According to NASA, while longer bursts are associated with star death. BOAT is firmly in the latter position.
The researchers intentionally waited several months after the boat was detected before pointing the Webb telescope at it. That’s because the explosion was so bright, and its brightness lasted so long, that scientists had to wait until it died down to find any signs of the supernova that caused it.
The research team used the telescope’s near-infrared spectrometer (NIRSpec) to examine elements typically found in supernovae. The signal was not particularly bright, indicating that the supernova itself that produced the brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed was not superlative.
“This event is particularly exciting because some have hypothesized that bright gamma-ray bursts like Boat’s could create many heavy elements like gold and platinum,” said study co-author and Harvard University scientist. said astrophysicist Ashley Villar. Astrophysics | Harvard University and Smithsonian University, in a release. “If they were right, the boat would have been a treasure trove. It’s really surprising that no evidence of these heavy elements was found.”
A long gamma-ray burst is one that lasts more than two seconds. The boat lasted a whopping 10 hours. According to Science News. However, from a technical point of view, the boat is not actually boat. But Eric Burns, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University and co-author of the paper, said this was “possibly the brightest burst of X-ray and gamma-ray energy since the beginning of human civilization.” “It’s expensive.” study Signal description.
A year after the signal, a scientific collaboration found that the boat was emitting energetic gamma rays. Reach up to 13 teraelectronvolts—Same energy as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider During the second run.
Scientists continue to comb through the large amount of data obtained from the boat. Last June, one group reported: Burst jet structureSo physicists may need to rework their models of jet structure. Despite all the praise, the boat isn’t the biggest explosion ever seen in space. This title belongs to AT2021lwx, an almost 8 billion year old explosion from a distant black hole and the gas cloud surrounding it.
Astronomers will likely see more explosions like this, and boat-like explosions, as the next generation of observatories becomes operational. One of the most hyped facilities is the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. 3.2 billion pixel camera It collects terabytes of data of the southern sky every night.
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