Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – Gamma-ray Bursting With Surprises
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2222/gamma-ray-bursting-with-surprises/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Recently a team led by Tadahiro Kimura from the University of Tokyo and Masahiro Ikoma from the NAOJ develop computer model of water resulting from interactions between the hot, molten surface of a young planet and its early atmosphere, the team found that the water content in planets can range much wider than expected.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
Gamma-ray Bursting With Surprises
For the first time, astronomers found surprising clues of a ‘kilonova’ – a huge explosion sparked by the clash of neutron stars when they were studying the “post-credits-scene” so to speak, of a long gamma-ray burst.
But what makes this kilonova discovery surprising?
How did two different teams of astronomers discover the same surprising results?
And why do I have so many questions?
Ahem…
Let’s explore!
Gamma-ray bursts, GRBs, are the most powerful, uh, “fireworks” in the Universe.
GRBs usually happen in the very distant, early universe.
So distant that it takes 6 to 13 billion years for light from these bursts to reach our planet, making it impossible to study them – until now.
In 2021, NASA’s Fermi & Swift space telescopes simultaneously picked up a powerful flash of gamma rays – named GRB 211211A, that was unusually close to our planet, only about a billion light-years away.
So this GRB is one of the last GRBs to happen.
A late bloomer!
The beauty of it being so close by is that astronomers could now study this newly discovered long GRB in great detail.
Long GRBs mainly occur when a massive star, at least ten times the mass of our Sun, explodes as a supernova.
Whereas short GRBs occur when two compact objects such as two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole, smash into each other, creating a kilonova.
Unlike a supernova that lasts up to a minute, a kilonova only lasts around two seconds!
Boom, and it’s done!
Think of it this way: The supernova lets out its gamma rays slowly & sparingly. Greedily keeping them for itself.
The neutron star merger dumps all its gamma rays in one quick blast, which leaves behind a faint infrared glow.
A team using the Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i and another team using the Gemini South telescope in Chile were both looking at GRB 211211A independently.
They were both following up on the Swift & Fermi detection.
The space telescopes had detected a 51 second-long, slow GRB and the astronomers were expecting to find a supernova, with its usual lack of an IR glow, a typical long GRB.
To their surprise, both teams saw the near-infrared afterglow which is a feature of a kilonova, in the same location where the GRB had originated.
Which should have come from a short GRB, not a long one!
This discovery shows that there’s more to understand about how GRBs happen.
So it’s back to the drawing board.
Or blackboard…
But wait! There’s more!
The extreme physical conditions in kilonovae produce heavy elements such as gold, platinum, and thorium.
This gives astrophysicists a new way to study how these elements form in the Universe.
Hey, here’s a cool fact!
The twin Gemini telescopes were the first to detect this kilonova in the near-infrared wavelengths of the electromagentic spectrum.
You see, when the supernova blows up it blows off so much of these heavy atoms that they block the visible light like so much smoke.
But the IR light, being a longer wavelength, slips right through the particles and shows up in the near-IR detectors at the two Gemini Observatories.
You can think of it as being like how the red light from our Sun passes through our atmosphere and shows up as a red sunset while its blue light gets scattered away in random directions.
Long wavelengths penetrate dust better than short ones do.
So the two teams of astronomers will surely be making more observations the moment the space telescopes detect a GRB.
Stay, uh, tuned, and we’ll update you as more is discovered!
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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