The Swift telescope has been relentlessly searching for gamma-ray bursts since the past six years and got a glimpse of that again. Gamma-ray burst are ultra bright flashes in the sky that signal the birth of a black hole. Although the distance of his happening and the telescope was a massive five billion light years even then the burst was powerful enough to blind the telescope for some time. But the burst of June 21 was so powerful that it led to the shut down of the telescope’s data processing software. The software ignored the burst as a anomaly. Neil Gehrels, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland said on Wednesday that the burst is named GRB 100621A.
The telescope mentioned here is Swift that has been in orbit around the Earth since 2004 and has been in the lookout for these bright flashes in the skies. After the initial flash of gamma rays it is also capable of recording high-energy x-rays as well as the afterglow of lower-energy x-rays and ultraviolet radiations. The chances of the telescope of catching such lights are almost one per day. But since the telescope cannot see the whole sky at once the chances reduce to just two explosions per week. The energy released in such explosions is the Gamma rays that are the most powerful of all radiations. These rays are capable of penetrating even the densest objects. This also gives them the capability to travel from sources at very edges of the observable universe and be noticeable by the telescope.
The gamma ray burst occurs when very heavy cores of the dying stars continuously keeps shrinking under its own weight and a very powerful gravitational pull. Finally the core collapses and the result is a powerful blast of radiations followed by the creation of a black hole. The gamma rays travel faster and reach the Earth first.
On June 21 just a minute long gamma ray radiation was sufficient to blind Swift for almost a week. Burrows, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University later confirmed that the Swift wasn’t hurt or damaged but the software on the ground thought something was wrong with the data and threw it out. Gehrels said “So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn’t count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami.”
The light was so bright that it completely saturated the detectors.
When the scrapped data was studied, it was established that the burst sent out 145,000 photons a second that is about 10 to 15 timed more than the previous high recorded of 10,000 photons a second. Scientist are now busy racking their brains to understand what would have triggered such a massive explosion. They are also trying to devise ways to use such gamma ray explosions to study the building up of the universe.
The new burst has also made raised a challenge for the designers to make sure the probe will be able to handle the brightest flashes the universe can dish out.