Researchers have for the first time managed to observe one of the most powerful flashes in the sky caused by the collision of a star and a neutron star by radio astronomy with a wavelength of one millimeter.
First reported by The Independent, the findings were carried out by researchers from Northwestern University in Illinois and Radboud University in the Netherlands.
They used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio telescope in Chile to capture the remains of GRB 211106A – the abbreviated GRB (gamma-ray burst) originating from a galaxy about 20 billion light-years away.
“This short gamma-ray burst is the first time we have attempted to observe such an event with ALMA. Residual light for short bursts,” Wen-Fi Fong, a Northwestern physics and astronomy professor, said in a statement. Very hard to come by, so it was wonderful to see this event shine so brightly.”
What is GRB?
GRBs are powerful bursts of gamma radiation that appear when massive stars collapse into black holes or neutron stars, especially dense in binary systems that combine with their fellow stars to form black holes.
Tanmay Lasker, an astronomer at Radboud University and lead author of the paper, said, “This merger occurs because gravitational wave radiation removes energy from the orbits of the binary stars, causing the stars to spin toward each other. The resulting explosions travel near the jet. The speed of light. When one of these beams is directed at Earth, we see short-wave gamma-ray radiation or short-period GRBs.”
Short-duration GRBs can only last for a fraction of a second, however, the residual light they emit lasts much longer in less energetic wavelengths of light, which can last for minutes, even hours, or even hours. can last for days.
