Scientists have identified a dazzling burst of X-rays so bright that they blinded a camera that had been set up to watch the event. The X-ray blast is the brightest ever detected from an object outside our own galaxy. The X-rays had been travelling for over 5 billion years before being detected by the X-ray telescope on board the Swift satellite: a joint NASA, UK, and Italian mission. The source of the light was a Gamma-Ray Burst: a violent eruption of energy from a massive star collapsing into a black hole. The flash was so bright that the X-ray camera was temporarily dazzled. ‘The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented,' said Neil Gehrels, Swift's principial investigator, based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that Gamma Ray Bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be.’ Analysis of the flash revealed that the blast's brightness peaked at 143,000 X-ray photons per second during its fleeting period of record-breaking brightness; 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky. ‘Gamma Ray Bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe,' said Julian Osborne, the head of the Swift team at Leicester, ‘but their radiation is not limited to Gamma Rays, and the X-ray telescope on Swift has produced a wealth of ground-breaking scientific results.(Daily Mail)Thursday, 15 July 2010
Space explosion from collapsing star blinds satellite in brightest ever X-ray blast
Scientists have identified a dazzling burst of X-rays so bright that they blinded a camera that had been set up to watch the event. The X-ray blast is the brightest ever detected from an object outside our own galaxy. The X-rays had been travelling for over 5 billion years before being detected by the X-ray telescope on board the Swift satellite: a joint NASA, UK, and Italian mission. The source of the light was a Gamma-Ray Burst: a violent eruption of energy from a massive star collapsing into a black hole. The flash was so bright that the X-ray camera was temporarily dazzled. ‘The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented,' said Neil Gehrels, Swift's principial investigator, based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that Gamma Ray Bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be.’ Analysis of the flash revealed that the blast's brightness peaked at 143,000 X-ray photons per second during its fleeting period of record-breaking brightness; 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky. ‘Gamma Ray Bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe,' said Julian Osborne, the head of the Swift team at Leicester, ‘but their radiation is not limited to Gamma Rays, and the X-ray telescope on Swift has produced a wealth of ground-breaking scientific results.(Daily Mail)