While tracking an incredibly bright gamma-ray burst to its origins, scientists uncovered a hidden explosion that could upend decades of research.
Astronomers have tracked a mysterious, super bright beam of light to a hidden, deep-space explosion 1.1 billion light-years from Earth. This distant explosion, likely caused by the collision of two ultra-dense neutron stars, could upend scientists' understanding of how the universe's brightest, most energetic light is created.
GRBs are the brightest, most energetic explosions in the universe since the Big Bang. They come in two main varieties: short and long. Short GRBs, which last less than two seconds, are commonly detected in old, quiet regions of space with little star formation. These brief blasts are often attributed to faraway collisions between massive objects, such as neutron stars and black holes.
"When we followed this long gamma-ray burst, we expected it would lead to evidence of a massive star collapse," Wen-fai Fong, an assistant professor of astronomy and physics at Northwestern University in Illinois and co-author of the Nature Astronomy paper, said in a statement ."Instead, what we found was very different."
However, scientists had never seen a long GRB that apparently originated from a neutron star collision. The authors of the new Nature studies have dubbed the 50-second GRB from last December an"oddball" that appears to have been created the same way as a short GRB, only with the duration of a long one.
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