Record-Breaking Monstrous Gamma-Ray Photons Detected

For the first time ever, terrestrial telescopes detected gamma photons coming from gamma-ray bursts – and straight away, they were record-breaking with photons up to 1000 GeV.

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The strongest explosions in the Universe can be even more energetic than we previously thought. Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are still quite mysterious and we still do not know the exact mechanisms that fire them off. But be sure that they have to be events that shake the Universe. Teams from terrestrial gamma telescopes recently found themselves with an incredible success when they detected the so far most energetic gamma radiation from GRBs ever.

All this while being the first (and second) time when a terrestrial observatory detected any GRB. Scientists have been attempting to detect one for many years but they just weren't able to. While they detected many interesting sources of gamma radiation GRBs just seemed to be too hard to detect. But that all changed on the 20th of July of 2018 and 14th January of 2019.

In the summer of 2018 the terrestrial gamma telescope High-Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) in Nambia detected the GRB 180720B and in January of 2019, the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) in La Palma on the Canary Islands detected the main blast of the GRB 190114C. Both of these observations didn't come from nowhere. First, they were detected by NASA space gamma observatories they quickly alerted other gamma observatories and telescopes. The MAGIC telescope took just 57 seconds to focus at the GRB 190114C after the alert. During the first 20 seconds, they detected about a thousand extreme photons.

MAGIC found gamma photons with energies of 200 billion to 1 trillion electronvolts or 0.2 to 1 TeV. These are by far the most energetic photons that we ever found associated with a GRB. For comparison, visible light photons have an energy of roughly 1 to 3 electron volts. That means these photons had 200 to 1000 billion times more energy. Later observations showed that the source of GRB 190114C is about a billion light-years away.

The catch of the H.E.S.S. telescope was somewhat smaller but still interesting. H.E.S.S. caught a total of 199 photons of energies between 100 and 440 billion electronvolts. But the interesting fact comes in that this was the afterglow or the faltering radiation after the GRB itself. They were photons that arrived more than 10 hours after the GRB was detected by the explosion itself by space observatories.

The detection of these extreme gamma photons gives us new ideas about the GRBs themselves. Now we know that the mechanisms of these monstrous explosions can accelerate particles to extreme energies. It seems that so far we overlooked about half of their potential power.

Sources:

• http://www.desy.de/news/news_search/index_eng.html?openDirectAnchor=1735
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1743-9
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1750-x
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1754-6

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