The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded recently illuminated a distant galaxy, and astronomers called it a boat, meaning the brightest ever. A gamma-ray burst is an energy explosion that occurs when a massive star dies, leaving behind a black hole or neutron star. The collapse causes gamma-ray eruptions from the poles of the original star. If these jets happen to be pointed at Earth, astronomers can see them as gamma-ray bursts.
Researchers announced, on October 13, that This burst, in particular, named GRB 221009A, was triggered by a supernova that created a black hole in a galaxy that is approximately 2 billion light-years from Earth, it is said to have released about as much energy as much as three suns, converting that mass into pure energy. On October 9, at about 10:15 a.m., NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope in orbit, automatically discovered the explosion, and immediately alerted the astronomers about the incident.
The plane of the Milky Way appeared to match the blast’s position in the sky. Kennea and her colleagues initially believed the blast to be within our own galaxy and so unlikely to be an event with such a significant increase in energy as a gamma-ray burst. This burst would have been visible to the human eye if it had occurred inside the Milky Way, however that wasn’t the case.
But, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an orbiting NASA telescope designed to help observe such events. had also picked up on the flash; so bright that it oversaturated the telescope. It was among the brightest phenomenon the telescope had ever recorded. After re-examining the Swift data, Kennea and her colleagues came to the conclusion that the flash was the brightest gamma-ray burst they had ever seen in their 50 years of watching such explosions.
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