Astronomers have seen the glow of a faint, rapid explosion 10 billion light-years away.
The afterglow is so far away that it only happened 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang, and offers a glimpse of the universe when it was relatively close to its beginning.
The afterglow came from a brief gamma-ray burst that is the second most distant of the detected SGRBs, and the first in which astronomers were able to see the subsequent optic glow that followed.
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“We certainly did not expect to discover a distant SGRB, as they are extremely rare and very weak,” said Wen-fai Fong of Northwestern, lead author of the study.
“We do ‘forensic analysis’ with telescopes to understand their local environment, because the appearance of their galaxy can tell us a lot about the underlying physics of these systems.”
The researchers now expect to see many more of those explosions, some of the brightest and most powerful explosions in the entire universe, that occur when two neutron stars merge, which may help us understand more about the circumstances under which they occur.
“We believe we are discovering the tip of the iceberg in terms of distant SGRBs,” said Kerry Paterson, first author of the study. “That motivates us to continue studying past events and intensely examine future ones.”
The recently discovered explosion is known as SGRB 181123B, and is described in a new study published in Astrophysical charts.
SRGBs occur when two neutron stars merge and cause a very short and very powerful burst of gamma rays, which are the most energetic form of light. Astronomers generally only see a handful of such SGRBs each year that are accurate enough to observe more.
Their glows of light usually only last a few hours before they fade, and they are no longer visible. That means scientists can seldom catch the glow before it fades.
However, the ability to see the newly discovered distant afterglow happened due to quick and successful work. It was first seen by NASA’s Swift Neil Gehrels Observatory, and researchers were able to quickly use the International Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to search for the glow.
“We were able to obtain deep observations of the explosion a few hours after its discovery,” Paterson said. “The Gemini images were very sharp, allowing us to determine the location of a specific galaxy in the universe.”
Distance also means that SGRB was detected when the universe was only 30% of its current age, thus allowing astronomers to see neutron star mergers at a relatively young time in the development of the universe. The discovery suggests that neutron stars can fuse together fairly quickly, given that they had time to be born, live, and then die before combining with each other and sending the explosion, all while the universe was a relative “adolescent”.
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