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Record-Breaking Gamma-Ray Burst Leaves Astrophysicists in Awe

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On Oct. 9, an unbelievably powerful influx of X-rays and gamma rays infiltrated our solar system. It was likely the result of a massive explosion that happened 2.4 billion light-years away from Earth — and it’s left the science community stunned.

In the wake of the explosion, astrophysicists worldwide turned their telescopes toward the spectacular show, watching it unfold from a variety of cosmic vantage points. And as they vigilantly studied the event’s glimmering afterglow over the following week, they grew shocked by how utterly bright this gamma-ray burst seems to have been.

Eventually, the spectacle’s sheer intensity earned it a fitting (very millennial) name to accompany its robotic title of GRB221009A: B.O.A.T. — the “brightest of all time.”

“This GRB is an extraordinarily rare event,” Jillian Rastinejad, an astronomer at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “It was so bright that it triggered the Swift gamma-ray telescopes twice and fully saturated the detectors — something I haven’t seen in my time observing GRBs.”

So, what could be the root of this record-breaking eruption? Well, scientists reasoned, perhaps something just as mind-bendingly extreme.

As of now, the leading hypothesis is this GRB was generated by the death of an ancient star as it transformed into a monstrous black hole.

In the center of the image, among a vast array of stars against the black background of space, lies a highlighted speck. This is where the burst came from.
Highlighted is a speck of light signifying where GRB221009A came from.

 


International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. O’Connor/J. Rastinejad/W. Fong/T.A. Rector/J. Miller/M. Zamani/D. de Martin

The idea here is that a huge supernova in the distant universe might have spurred the birth of a black hole, and as black holes are known to spew supreme particle-jets traveling at nearly the speed of light, maybe this one’s jet spit its contents toward Earth.

Perhaps Oct. 9 was the day we received evidence of the budding abyss.

An illustration depicting the GRB. A bright purple, neon jet shoots out from a blue, dusty rose and neon purple supernova.An illustration depicting the GRB. A bright purple, neon jet shoots out from a blue, dusty rose and neon purple supernova.
An artist’s illustration of what the 2.4 billion-light-year-away jet may look like if we could stand right in front of it.

 


NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde

A ‘once-in-a-century’ opportunity

“We think this is a once-in-a-century opportunity to address some of the most fundamental questions regarding these explosions, from the formation of black holes to tests of dark matter models,” Brendan O’Connor, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland who helped initially observe the GRB, said in a statement.

Plus, if the burst really is connected to the genesis of an abyss like scientists imagine, it could provide us with valuable insight about how matter behaves while traveling near the speed of light, how stars collapse into unimaginably dense voids, and in a broader sense, what the conditions might be like in a galaxy other than our own — the distant realm where B.O.A.T. was born.

Bright orange, sort of grainy, rings are seen around a bright yellow dot in the center of the image.Bright orange, sort of grainy, rings are seen around a bright yellow dot in the center of the image.
Swift’s X-Ray Telescope captured the afterglow of GRB 221009A about an hour after it was first detected. The bright rings form as a result of X-rays scattered from otherwise unobservable dust layers within our galaxy that lie in the direction of the burst.

 


NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)

However, it’s worth mentioning that everyone involved with researching this GRB is being super careful before making a final declaration of cause. Teams are still observing the event’s “afterglow,” in order to pinpoint whether the dead star; black hole theory stands strong.

“Given that most other long GRBs result from a massive star collapsing, we have every reason to believe that we will find direct evidence of a supernova,” Rastinejad said. “But that will take more work and time to confirm, and the universe could always surprise us.”

GRBs can also be associated with other cosmic marvels. As an example, shorter ones, which last mere fractions of a second, tend to stem from neutron star collisions — the crash of stellar bodies so dense a tablespoon of one is equal to something like the weight of Mount Everest.

On the bright side, though, because this GRB is so bright and in its infancy, scientists expect to be able to monitor it for several months. After one month, Rastinejad expects evidence of the event to disappear behind the sun, but once it comes back out early next year, says “we will be excited to see the GRB as a messy ‘toddler.’ Then, we will be ready and waiting to capture it on camera.”

All eyes are on B.O.A.T.

“The record-breaking nature of this GRB has reinvigorated the larger observational community in a big way,” Rasinejad said. “Everyone — even those who don’t typically study GRBs — has tried to point their detectors at it. It is a beautiful and surreal thing to be a part of and to watch how this story unfolds.”

On one hand, NASA instruments on the International Space Station like the NICER X-Ray Telescope and a Japanese detector dubbed the Orbiting High-energy Monitor Alert Network are involved. Then you have two independent teams, one led by Rastinejad and the other by O’Connor, utilizing the ground-based Gemini South telescope in Chile. And that just scratches the surface of who’s staring at the electrifying burst.

With all eyes on B.O.A.T, even if it turns out to be true that this ultra-bright GRB is the product of a star’s collapse, there’d remain far more to learn from it. We’d have the “how,” but some researchers are especially interested in understanding why the collapse would have spurred an event with this level of energy.

Although explosive GRB eruptions are captured a couple times per week, Wen-fai Fong, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, emphasizes that “as long as we have been able to detect GRBs, there is no question that this GRB is the brightest that we have ever witnessed by a factor of 10 or more.”

It’s also curious that such high-energy rays could survive a 2.4 billion year-long journey to our planet in the first place. As the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab puts it, scientists are wondering how particles emitted by the burst could “defy our standard understanding of physics.”

To get to the bottom of all this, it’s promising that scientists believe this burst is much closer to Earth than your average GRB. This means we can glean lots of details from it that otherwise might be too faint to see.

And even though such proximity may also partially explain why it appears so luminescent to us, “it’s also among the most energetic and luminous bursts ever seen regardless of distance, making it doubly exciting,” Roberta Pillera, the astrophysicist at the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, who led initial communications about the burst, said in a statement.

As NASA simply summarized, “another GRB this bright may not appear for decades.”

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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