Scientists discover cause of brightest-ever burst of light | BBC News

Published: Apr 11, 2024 Duration: 00:03:44 Category: News & Politics

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now researchers have found the brightest burst of light ever recorded but have unearth further Mysteries surrounding it now the beam was 100 times brighter than any scene before and came from an exploding Supernova 2.4 billion light years away but astronomers are said to be stumped as to why this one was so powerful because the star was relatively small to make sense of this joining me now is Professor Katherine Haymon astronomer Royal for Scotland and professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh so um the brightest burst of light ever recorded can you just try to explain to us for maybe non- astrophysicists out there why this is so important yeah good afternoon Kylie so um this has been given the name the boat the brightest of all time um it s of smashed records in on astronomical uh levels um in being as you said 100 times brighter than anything we'd seen before in the gamma rays um so imagine the Avengers Hulk with his gamma rays that was what it emitted over a burst that lasted seven minutes um so us researchers have found that this was caused by a supern noi um I guess maybe people might remember the Oasis song The Smashing supern noi well uh a supery is what happens when a massive star dies um it sort of collapses into uh what we think might be a black hole and in that explosion it creates a lot of light so uh it was thought that because the boat had been the brightest of all times in gamma rays it would also have a really really powerful supern noi but what these researchers have confirmed is that it was actually a pretty bog standard supern noi which raises sort of lots of questions of like well why did this particular one appear so bright uh for us observing it here on Earth so what does all this mean then what can we kind of read into it and then in the future learn from it I guess yeah so um there are they've estimated that this sort of event would only happen one every 10,000 years so we're not going to get another event like this um to compare with um so there'll be lots of different types of research going on more data taken the other interesting thing that this us team has found is that they expected to see um lots of heavy chemicals around this massive explosion so um I don't know if you're married Kylie but um if you do have a gold wedding ring um we thought that that sort of heavy chemical gold or platinum or uranium that would be created in a massive explosive event like this um but the US researchers haven't found any evidence of that so again it's another puzzle um with this data they've answered one question what caused this massive massive explosion in our universe but it's left us with more questions of well why isn't it what we thought it would look like why aren't there these heavy chemicals there why isn't it as powerful as we thought it would be um and and that's why we love science because you never always get the right answer and you have to go back to the drawing board and and think more deeply about the problem I quite like the fact that this uh insignificant star has such a a the brightest burst of light ever recorded that's quite nice isn't it Professor Katherine hymon we appreciate your time here on BBC news thank you thank you

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