On October 9th, 2022, a gamma-ray burst known as BOAT, was detected by numerous spacecraft and observatories around the globe, triggering excitement among astronomers who dubbed it the "brightest of all time."
A Blinding Gamma-Ray Burst
This burst was so bright that it blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, and it was effectively impossible to directly record the actual intensity of the emission.
However, through data gathered by NASA and other observatories, scientists were able to reconstruct the information and compared results, concluding that BOAT was 70 times brighter than any burst seen before.
Eric Burns, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, led an analysis of 7,000 GRBs to determine how frequently events like BOAT occurred. His team found that such events happen once every 10,000 years, making BOAT incredibly rare.
NASA notes that GRB 221009A is one of the closest-known "long" GRBs, meaning its initial, or prompt, emission lasts longer than two seconds. The signal from this GRB traveled for around 1.9 billion years before it reached Earth.
The team said it is possible the entire star collapsed back into a black hole instead of bursting. Webb and Hubble observations will be taken over the next few months to shed more light on this mysterious gamma-ray burst.
Light Echoes
The intense burst also allowed astronomers to investigate remote clouds in the Milky Way galaxy. NASA notes that when the prompt X-rays move toward us, some of them reflected off of dust layers that gave rise to "light echoes" in the form of X-ray rings.
Several echoes were found by NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory's X-ray Telescope. Swift data and in-depth follow-up by the XMM-Newton instrument operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered that the rings were created by 21 different dust storms.
Only seven gamma-ray bursts have been observed to have X-ray rings, and GRB 221009A triples that number, according to NASA. Dust between 700 and 61,000 light-years away produced the echoes.
The farthest echoes were similarly 4,600 light-years above the solar system's location in the galaxy's central plane, on the opposite side of our Milky Way galaxy.
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Cosmic Puzzle
The blast also presents a chance to investigate a significant cosmic puzzle. Michela Negro, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, said, "we think of black holes as all-consuming things, but do they also return power back to the universe? "
Her team was able to examine the dust rings using NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer to understand how the prompt emission was organized, which can help explain how the jets emerged.
It may be feasible to demonstrate that the BOAT's jets were fueled by utilizing the energy of a magnetic field amplified by the black hole's spin in combination with similar measures being examined by a team using data from ESA's INTEGRAL telescope.
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