Submitted by ICumCoffee t3_1258ry6 in space
What's the explanation for this? Closer than usual? New phenomenon?
It IS one of the closest-and energetic Gamma Ray burst and most common cause of GRBs is formation of a new black hole. And one of the jet was exceptionally narrow and pointed directly at us, so that’s why it was brighter than usual.
Did you mean directly or /directly/
If it was directly, we'd all be dead.
Er…no, not really.
This was about 1.9 billion light years from Earth. The closest GRB ever observed was about 130 million light years from Earth. For a GRB to pose any sort of threat to life on Earth, it would need to be about 8,000 light years from Earth, and even at that range, we wouldn’t “all be dead” (though there’d be a significant increase in things like cancer rates for the next decade or two due to atmospheric damage).
Read 'Supernova Era' if anyone wants to read a sci-fi book about this.
Thanks for this recommendation! Definitely going to check this book out!
Does that mean we have this increase risk of cancer now even though it was far away ?
No. It needs to be about 8,000 light years away (or less) to start affecting the atmosphere. It would be that damage that would increase cancer risk.
Think if the ozone layer hole kept expanding globally, instead of shrinking like it’s doing now.
I've seen one article attributing it to the formation of a new black hole but I'm not sure how certain that interpretation is at this point.
That's just how many GRBs happen. There are certain kinds of stellar deaths which result in the collapse of an extremely massive star into a black hole. As a considerable chunk of the rest of the star gets swallowed by the black hole it forms into an accretion disk and the rotation creates high energy axial jets. The axial jets contain super energetic material being propelled at close to the speed of light, this creates a relativistic effect which substantially increases the brightness of the emitted energy near the axis of the beam. Many of these events occur throughout the universe routinely, projecting intense gamma ray beams across billions of lightyears. When Earth happens to be in one of these beams we detect a gamma ray burst.
This particular event wasn't inherently exceptionally bright, nor exceptionally close (it was about 1.9 billion lightyears away), but we were basically directly in the brightest part of the beam, which is very narrow.
do we see them happen when they aren't pointed somewhat at us? like, if there is nothing for the light to reflect off of we won't see the light right? like in the case of one pointed perpendicular to us, for example
We won't see them as gamma ray bursts but we might see them as supernova (or hypernova) events, but only much closer.
Might have been a larger than normal GRB and/or it was pointed directly at us by sheer luck.
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