Scientists detected the brightest light in the universe for the first time, following a mysterious explosion in space
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businessinsider.in/science/space/…
Two violent explosions in galaxies billions of light-years away recently produced the brightest light in the universe. Scientists caught it in action for the first time.
Just 50 seconds after satellites spotted the January explosion, telescopes on Earth swiveled to catch a flood of thousands of particles of light.
After the brief, intense eruptions of gamma rays, hours or days of afterglow follow.
Within 22 seconds, these space telescopes - the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope - beamed the coordinates of the burst to astronomers all over Earth.
Within 27 seconds of receiving the coordinates, astronomers in the Canary Islands turned two Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescopes toward that exact point in the sky.
Scientists had long suspected that this scattering was one way gamma-ray bursts could produce so much ultra-high-energy light in the afterglow phase.
Scientists expect to learn more as they turn telescopes toward more gamma-ray bursts like these in the future.
