Indian astronomers part of team spotting unique Gamma-ray burst

A group of astronomers few of them Indians have detected a very short powerful burst of highenergy radiation that lasted for about a second and had been racing towards Earth for nearly half the present age of the universeThe burst detected by NASAs Fermi Gammaray Space Telescope on August 26 2020 turned out to be one for the record books the shortest Gammaray burst GRB caused by the death of a massive starGRBs are the most powerful events in the universe detectable across billions of lightyears Astronomers classify them as long or short based on whether the event lasts for more or less than two seconds They observe long bursts in association with the demise of massive stars while short bursts have been linked to a different scenarioThe identification of this short event GRB which involved several scientists across the world including Shashi Bhushan Pandey from the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences ARIES an institute of the Department of Science and Technology DST as well as scientists from other Indian institutions showed for the first time that a dying star can produce short bursts tooAlso read NASAs moon mission manikin named after Apollo 13 engineerFrom India The InterUniversity Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics IUCAA Pune National Centre for Radio Astrophysics Tata Institute of Fundamental Research NCRA Pune and IIT Mumbai also participated in this work a release from the Department of Science and Technology said on TuesdaySuch a discovery has helped resolve the longstanding issues related to Gammaray bursts Also this study triggers to reanalyse all such known events to constrain number densities better Pandey explainedNamed GRB 200826 after the date it occurred the burst is the subject of two papers published in Nature Astronomy on July 26The first led by Binbin Zhang from the Nanjing University in China and the University of Nevada in Las Vegas explores the Gammaray dataThe second led by Tomas Ahumada a doctoral student at the University of Maryland College Park and NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland describes the GRBs fading multiwavelength afterglow and the emerging light of the supernova explosion that followedWe think this event was effectively a fizzle one that was close to not happening at all Ahumada saidEven so the burst emitted 14 million times the energy released by the entire Milky Way galaxy over the same amount of time making it one of the most energetic shortduration GRBs ever seen Ahumada addedWhen a star much more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel its core suddenly collapses and forms a black hole As matter swirls toward the black hole some of it escapes in the form of two powerful jets that rush outward at almost the speed of light in opposite directions Astronomers only detect a GRB when one of these jets happens to point almost directly towards EarthEach jet drills through the star producing a pulse of Gamma rays ndash the highestenergy form of light ndash which can last up to minutesFollowing the burst the disrupted star then rapidly expands as a supernova Short GRBs on the other hand form when pairs of compact objects ndash such as neutron stars which also form during stellar collapse ndash spiral inward over billions of years and collideGRB 200826 was a sharp blast of highenergy emission lasting just 065 seconds After traveling for eons through the expanding universe the signal had stretched out to about onesecondlong when it was detected by Fermis Gammaray Burst MonitorThe event also appeared in instruments aboard NASAs Wind Mission which orbits a point between Earth and the Sun located about 930000 miles 15 million km away and Mars Odyssey which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001 ESAs the European Space Agencys INTEGRAL satellite observed the blast as wellThe discovery helps resolve a longstanding puzzle While long GRBs must be coupled to supernovae astronomers detect far greater numbers of supernovae than they do long GRBsThe researchers conclude that collapsing stars producing short GRBs must be marginal cases whose lightspeed jets teeter on the brink of success or failure a conclusion consistent with the notion that most massive stars die without producing jets and GRBs at all More broadly this result clearly demonstrates that a bursts duration alone does not uniquely indicate its originThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever