Gamma rays. It’s an explosion that can change the way you think about the universe

Until about the end of the 1990s, astronomers did not see anything like this. In 1998, a burst of gamma rays emitted in a hyperventilation burst was first observed.

A hypernova is a supernova explosion of massive stars with a mass at least thirty times the mass of the sun. When thermonuclear reactions stop in its nucleus, it collapses into the black hole stage. The star’s outer layers are ejected into space, but some of the material falls back onto the newly formed black hole, forming an accretion disk around it. Excess matter is emitted from the vicinity of the black hole in powerful jets that emit powerful gamma rays.

Last year, astronomers recorded a new gamma-ray burst, originating from hyperventilation. The flare is rated as GRB 200826A. According to scientistsعلم The new impulse is the shortest of all associated with hyper nova. Originally, when the flare was detected in August 2020, astronomers suspected that it was emitted by the merger of two neutron stars. Only now, scientists have discovered a faint light source in the place from which the glow came to us. It turns out that the spectrum of the object is consistent with the explosion of the supernova, and not with the process of merging neutron stars.

Works independently بشكل A team of astrophysicists from Nanjing University In China he reached the same conclusion. Although the glow lasted only a second, all of its other features indicate hypernova.

Until now, scientists believed that gamma rays are emitted by relativistic jets emanating from the poles of a rotating black hole caused by an intensely breathing explosion. If so, the gamma-ray burst would be much longer. Here we are dealing with a flash that only lasts one second. This means that in this case the jets did not eventually form, or were not able to penetrate the surrounding material.

This in turn leads to another conclusion: that many other short gamma-ray bursts previously thought to be bursts from other processes may have been in fact hyperventilation. So there may be more explosions in the universe than it seems. This, in turn, will have other consequences for the evolution of the universe, since hyperventilation explosions are one of the main sources of all heavy elements in the universe.