So Cool! Also, instant death if it were closer. GRBs.

Article on a large star collapsing. Impressive stuff. also, if it had been closer we would all be dead. Wiki here. As it stands, it only affected India's ionosphere.  picture from nasalink for pic. 


Smart person comment here: 

Astronomer here- I'm actually the one quoted in this article! :D

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are typically seen in galaxies billions and billions of light years away. This specific time is called a "long GRB" because it lasted for a few minutes, and we think they mark the death of a gigantic star 30-40x the mass of the sun as it collapses into a black hole. Most stars that go supernova even are not big enough to emit a GRB upon their death, and they are very directional (the GRBs are emitted along the axis of the dying star, in a jet just a few degrees wide), so a galaxy our size for example would only emit a GRB about once every million years. Plus then you'd have to be perfectly lined up to see it, hence why most of these guys are super far away.

Enter GRB 221009A, which was "only" 2 billion light years away! For context this is a once in a decade event to have one at this distance, and it's the most luminous and closest ones ever! It's also setting a lot of crazy records- the highest energy photon ever was detected, and it even disturbed the ionosphere in India. It was coincidentally in the galactic plane, so we even see rings in X-rays as the dust in our galaxy scatters light from the GRB behind it (today's APOD picture in fact!)!

Anyway, if you're an astronomer like me who does transients (ie things that change over time) it's been a really busy week, because we now get to study the "afterglow" from the GRB for a few weeks tops, and everyone with a small-ish telescope could see it. Personally I applied and got "emergency time" on the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea- my first time using this telescope in fact!- and we got a detection! I am also on a proposal to request emergency JWST time for this source... but we haven't heard back yet, so I don't want to publicly share just what we plan to do with that info yet.

Anyway, really exciting to see all this happen and be a part of getting observations out to the world! Can't wait to read the first papers and see what else we learn from this one!

Edit: if you are really keen on specific observations, I highly recommend you go to the GCN alerts page, which is kind of the clearing house for info on rapid observations relating to GRBs everyone around the world needs. (ie, get some initial data out, save the detailed work and analysis for the paper- we can't wait for the paper for details, this will be faded by then) Lots of interesting stuff there if you poke around!

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