Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, W. Fong (Northwestern)

Long ago and far across the universe, an enormous burst of gamma rays unleashed more energy in a half-second than the Sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. In May of this year, scientists detected the light from that flash as it finally reached Earth. They quickly trained NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on the location to study the associated afterglow. Based on X-ray and radio observations from other observatories, the team was baffled by what they saw with Hubble — the near-infrared emission detected by Hubble was 10 times brighter than predicted.

These results challenge conventional theories of what happens in the aftermath of a gamma-ray burst. One possibility is that the observations might point to the birth of a massive, highly magnetized neutron star called a magnetar.

“These observations do not fit traditional explanations for short gamma-ray bursts,” said study leader Wen-fai Fong of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “Given what we know about the radio and X-rays from this blast, it just doesn’t match up. The near-infrared emission that we’re finding with Hubble is way too bright. In terms of trying to fit the puzzle pieces of this gamma-ray burst together, one puzzle piece is not fitting correctly.”

Without Hubble, the gamma-ray burst (GRB) would have appeared like many other GRBs, and Fong and her team would not have known about the bizarre infrared behavior. “It’s amazing to me that after 10 years of studying the same type of phenomenon, that we can discover unprecedented behavior like this,” said Fong. “It just reveals the diversity of explosions that the universe is capable of producing, which is very exciting.”

Light Fantastic

The intense flashes of gamma rays from these bursts appear to come from jets of material that are moving extremely close to the speed of light. The jets do not contain a lot of mass — maybe a millionth of the mass of the Sun — but because they’re moving so fast

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2020/news-2020-48

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

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