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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Fermi Finds New Feature in Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Yet Seen
In October 2022, astronomers were stunned by what was quickly dubbed the BOAT — the brightest-of-all-time gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now an international science team reports that data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a feature never seen before.
The brightest gamma-ray burst yet recorded gave scientists a new high-energy feature to study. Learn what NASA’s Fermi mission saw, and what this feature may be telling us about the burst’s light-speed jets. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
“A few minutes after the BOAT erupted, Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor recorded an unusual energy peak that caught our attention,” said lead researcher Maria Edvige Ravasio at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and affiliated with Brera Observatory, part of INAF (the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics) in Merate, Italy. “When I first saw that signal, it gave me goosebumps. Our analysis since then shows it to be the first high-confidence emission line ever seen in 50 years of studying GRBs.”
A paper about the discovery appears in the July 26 edition of the journal Science.
When matter interacts with light, the energy can be absorbed and reemitted in characteristic ways. These interactions can brighten or dim particular colors (or energies), producing key features visible when the light is spread out, rainbow-like, in a spectrum. These features can reveal a wealth of information, such as the chemical elements involved in the interaction. At higher energies, spectral features can uncover specific particle processes, such as matter and antimatter annihilating to produce gamma rays.
“While some previous studies have reported possible evidence for absorption and emission features in other GRBs, subsequent scrutiny revealed that all of these could just be statistical fluctuations. What we see in the BOAT is different,” said coauthor Om Sharan Salafia at INAF-Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy. “We’ve determined that the odds this feature is just a noise fluctuation are less than one chance in half a billion.”
A jet of particles moving at nearly light speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept. The star’s core ran out of fuel and collapsed into a black hole. Some of the matter swirling toward the black hole was redirected into dual jets firing in opposite directions. We see a gamma-ray burst when one of these jets happens to point directly at Earth. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab GRBs are the most powerful explosions in the cosmos and emit copious amounts of gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light. The most common type occurs when the core of a massive star exhausts its fuel, collapses, and forms a rapidly spinning black hole. Matter falling into the black hole powers oppositely directed particle jets that blast through the star’s outer layers at nearly the speed of light. We detect GRBs when one of these jets points almost directly toward Earth.
The BOAT, formally known as GRB 221009A, erupted Oct. 9, 2022, and promptly saturated most of the gamma-ray detectors in orbit, including those on Fermi. This prevented them from measuring the most intense part of the blast. Reconstructed observations, coupled with statistical arguments, suggest the BOAT, if part of the same population as previously detected GRBs, was likely the brightest burst to appear in Earth’s skies in 10,000 years.
The putative emission line appears almost 5 minutes after the burst was detected and well after it had dimmed enough to end saturation effects for Fermi. The line persisted for at least 40 seconds, and the emission reached a peak energy of about 12 MeV (million electron volts). For comparison, the energy of visible light ranges from 2 to 3 electron volts.
So what produced this spectral feature? The team thinks the most likely source is the annihilation of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.
“When an electron and a positron collide, they annihilate, producing a pair of gamma rays with an energy of 0.511 MeV,” said coauthor Gor Oganesyan at Gran Sasso Science Institute and Gran Sasso National Laboratory in L’Aquila, Italy. “Because we’re looking into the jet, where matter is moving at near light speed, this emission becomes greatly blueshifted and pushed toward much higher energies.”
If this interpretation is correct, to produce an emission line peaking at 12 MeV, the annihilating particles had to have been moving toward us at about 99.9% the speed of light.
“After decades of studying these incredible cosmic explosions, we still don’t understand the details of how these jets work,” noted Elizabeth Hays, the Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Finding clues like this remarkable emission line will help scientists investigate this extreme environment more deeply.”
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by Goddard. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.
By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Jul 25, 2024 Related Terms
Black Holes Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Gamma Rays Gamma-Ray Bursts Goddard Space Flight Center Marshall Space Flight Center Stellar-mass Black Holes The Universe Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
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By European Space Agency
Participants of ESA’s Industry Space Days (ISD 2024) share insights and tips on how to make the most of this space technology business event on 18–19 September at ESA-ESTEC in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
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By European Space Agency
An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth. While there were hints that the planet existed, it had not been confirmed until Webb imaged it. The planet is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date.
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Mechanical Engineer Jeff Pollack finalizes his design for the integration of the laser communications terminal into the PC-12 research aircraft.Credit: NASA/Sara Lowthian NASA invites media to attend a real-time laser communications experiment at the agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Researchers are testing a laser communications networking system that could enable the public to watch the first woman and first person of color walk on the Moon in HD during the Artemis missions.
The media availability begins at 11 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, July 30 (weather permitting) at the NASA Glenn aircraft hangar. Media will have the opportunity to see NASA’s Pilatus PC-12 aircraft take off and to film researchers on the ground as they communicate with the airborne team.
During these tests, researchers flying over Lake Erie will test communications between NASA Glenn and the aircraft using High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking developed by Glenn. The data is transferred over laser communications links at a rate of 1.2 gigabits per second — faster than most home internet speeds.
Earlier this summer, the research team streamed 4K video to the International Space Station from an aircraft for the first time in history.
Media interested in attending should contact Jan Wittry at jan.m.wittry-1@nasa.gov by 2 p.m. EDT on Monday, July 29.
These experiments are part of NASA’s goal to stream very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space, enabling future human missions beyond Earth orbit. In December, NASA streamed a video featuring a cat named Taters back to Earth from nearly 19 million miles away in deep space using NASA’s laser communications demonstration, marking a historic milestone.
About Laser Communications
Historically, missions have relied on the use of radio waves to exchange information to and from space. Now, NASA is embracing the power of laser communications, also known as optical communications, which uses infrared light rather than radio waves to transmit more data at once.
As NASA explores the lunar surface with advanced science instruments and captures high-definition data, researchers will need faster ways to send large amounts of information to Earth. Laser communications will accelerate the data transfer process and enable 10 to 100 times more data transmitted back to Earth than current radio frequency systems.
For more information on NASA, visit:
http://www.nasa.govnasa.gov
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Jan Wittry
NASA Glenn Research Center, Cleveland
216-433-5466
jan.m.wittry-1@nasa.gov
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By Space Force
The event not only marked the command’s first COR, but also SPACEFOR-INDOPAC’s first official ceremony since it’s activation in November 2022.
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