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Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Music: “Tides,” Jon Cotton [PRS] and Ben Niblett [PRS], Universal Production Music

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

Complete transcript available.

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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.

A few minutes after the BOAT erupted, Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor recorded an unusual energy peak. Scientists now say this feature is the first high-confidence emission line ever seen in 50 years of studying GRBs.

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.

The science team says that the odds this feature is a fluke — just a noise fluctuation — are less than one chance in half a billion.

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. If part of the same population as previously detected GRBs, the BOAT 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.

The team thinks the most likely source for the emission line is the annihilation of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. When these particles collide, they produce a pair of gamma rays with an energy of 0.511 MeV. 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.", "items": [], "extra_data": {} }, { "id": 375086, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14634/#media_group_375086", "widget": "Single image", "title": "", "caption": "", "description": "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.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Image description: Against a cloudy white and purple background, part of a bright blue-white star is visible at lower left. Emerging from the star and stretching diagonally across the frame is a narrow line, looking white nearest the star and becoming magenta farther away. At far right, the line — one of the dying star’s particle jets — forms a large, rounded blob. The image is watermarked “Artist’s concept.”

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Dark stripes indicate gaps between the detectors. A detailed analysis shows that the widest ring visible here, comparable to the apparent size of a full moon, came from dust clouds located about 1,300 light-years away. The innermost ring arose from dust at a distance of 61,000 light-years on the other side of our galaxy. GRB221009A is only the seventh gamma-ray burst to display X-ray rings, and it triples the number previously seen around one.Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/M. Rigoselli (INAF)", "width": 320, "height": 180, "pixels": 57600 } }, { "id": 14227, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14227/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "NASA Missions Detect Record-Breaking Burst", "description": "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 by otherwise unobservable dust layers within our galaxy that lie in the direction of the burst. The dark vertical line is an artifact of the imaging system.Credit: NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester) || XRT_image_crop.jpg (1084x1080) [629.3 KB] || XRT_image_crop_print.jpg (1024x1020) [657.0 KB] || XRT_image_crop_searchweb.png (320x180) [133.7 KB] || XRT_image_crop_web.png (320x318) [191.7 KB] || XRT_image_crop_thm.png (80x40) [26.1 KB] || ", "release_date": "2022-10-13T15:30:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-01-06T01:35:18.251897-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 368759, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a014200/a014227/LAT_221009A_burst_opt_1080.gif", "filename": "LAT_221009A_burst_opt_1080.gif", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "This sequence constructed from Fermi Large Area Telescope data reveals the sky in gamma rays centered on the location of GRB 221009A. Each frame shows gamma rays with energies greater than 100 million electron volts (MeV), where brighter colors indicate a stronger gamma-ray signal. In total, they represent more than 10 hours of observations. The glow from the midplane of our Milky Way galaxy appears as a wide diagonal band. The image is about 20 degrees across.Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration", "width": 1080, "height": 1080, "pixels": 1166400 } } ], "sources": [], "products": [], "newer_versions": [], "older_versions": [], "alternate_versions": [] }