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Gamma-Ray Burst Cuts Out
Our universe is filled with things that go flicker, flare, and boom in the night. One of the most amazing events we can catch are gamma-ray bursts. We didn’t know anything in the universe produced these high energy light waves until they were accidentally discovered in the 1960s when politicians launched gamma-ray detecting spacecraft to monitor the planet for nuclear explosions. Today, we know they come in at least 3 different forms: two varieties of short bursts, and longer bursts we’re still working out the details on. Back in 2020, a long gamma-ray burst attempted to masquerade as a short gamma-ray burst; for just 0.65 seconds, the Fermi gamma-ray burst monitor detected … something. The Zwicky Transient Facility went on to detect a supernova explosion in the same part of the sky, and it’s now thought that this was a classic long-duration GRB that for some reason had an abbreviated duration.
Supernovae on their own don’t look like much because of their extreme distance, but if we could zoom in we’d see something pretty amazing. It is believed that when some massive stars end their lives as supernovae, something happens that causes powerful jets to form, and those jets funnel gamma rays and other radiation in a narrow cone. When one of those cones happens to be directed at us, we get to see a long gamma-ray burst. These are generally powered for a noticeable period of time, up to 100s of seconds in…
