by C. RAMACHANDRAN
Evidence of a gamma-ray burst picked up by a NASA spacecraft has scientists wondering what mighty cosmic event could have caused it.
A COSMIC explosion that occurred about four billion years ago, just when the earth was being born, has scientists wondering what it could be. The electromagnetic flash from that was picked by the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft on March 28. Preliminary analyses of the unusual characteristics of the spectral distribution of the emission, which are still ongoing nearly three months after the first signal was picked up, have led two groups of scientists who observed it to believe that it could be because of a super massive black hole (SMBH) more than a million times the mass of the sun literally ripping apart a star of about the sun’s mass and slowly gobbling it up, resulting in perhaps the biggest and the brightest explosion seen yet from the earth. What makes it particularly unusual is that it is an extremely rare event in which the earth happened to be right in the direction of the jet-like emission from it.
Given the importance of the observation, the two groups wrote up their respective papers and submitted them for publication in three weeks’ time. They were published in the June 17 issue of the journal Science as companion research articles. One group was headed by Joshua S. Bloom of the University of California, Berkeley, and the other by Andrew Levan of the University of Warwick. A few names, including those of the two lead authors, figure in both the groups. “Despite the power of the cataclysmic event, we still only happen to see this event because our solar system happened to be looking right down the barrel of this jet of energy,” Levan remarked in a press release from Warwick.
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