Latest Gamma-ray burst Stories
At 12:05 p.m. EDT, the Delta II rocket easily lifted the GLAST spacecraft off the launch pad, out of smoke and clouds and into a beautiful Florida sky headed for space.
ESAâ€™s orbiting gamma-ray observatory, Integral has revealed a new population of exotic and dusty binary stars which might represent a brief evolutionary period in a binary starâ€™s life. The findings bring to light a gap in our knowledge of the formation and evolution of such binary star systems.
When NASA launches its newest space observatory, physicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will be watching as the product of nearly 16 years of hard work blasts into orbit.
Thanks to a fortunate observation with NASA's Swift satellite, astronomers, for the first time, have caught a normal supernova at the moment of its birth--the first instant when an exploding star begins spewing its energy into space, transforming into a supernova that during its brief lifetime will shine brighter than billions of stars combined.
NASA's Swift satellite picked up the brightest flare ever seen from a normal star other than our Sun. The flare, an explosive release of energy from a star, packed the power of thousands of solar flares.
Peering across 7.5 billion light-years and halfway back to the Big Bang, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the fading optical counterpart of a powerful gamma ray burst that holds the record for being the intrinsically brightest naked-eye object ever seen from Earth.
A powerful stellar explosion detected March 19 by NASA's Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. The explosion was a gamma ray burst.
Gamma-ray bursts are short-lived events, lasting between a few milliseconds to a few minutes. The brightest of them emit more energy in a few seconds than our Sun will emit in its whole 10 billion year lifetime.
NASA is preparing to launch a new space telescope named GLAST to study the most violent explosions in the history of our Universe. Called gamma-ray bursts, there is nothing more powerful.
NASAâ€™s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) has arrived at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington for its final round of testing.
Gamma-Ray Astronomy -- Gamma-ray astronomy is the astronomical study of gamma rays. Long before experiments could detect gamma rays emitted by cosmic sources, scientists had known that the universe should be producing these photons. Work by Feenberg and Primakoff in 1948, Hayakawa and Hutchinson in 1952, and, especially, Morrison in 1958 had led scientists to believe that a number of different processes which were occurring in the universe would result in gamma-ray emission. These...
Hypernova -- A hypernova is a theoretical type of supernova produced when exceptionally large stars collapse at the end of their lifespan. In a hypernova, the core of the star collapses directly into a black hole and two extremely energetic jets of plasma are emitted from its rotational poles at nearly light speed. These jets emit intense gamma rays, and are a candidate explanation for gamma ray bursts. Theorists have come up with several plausible explanations for hypernovae. It may...
Gamma-Ray Burst -- In astronomy, Gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) are flashes of gamma rays that last from seconds to hours, the longer ones being followed by several days of X-ray afterglow. They occur at random positions in the sky several times each day. They are now believed to result from tremendous explosions in far away galaxies, during the creation of a black hole from a dying star or two colliding neutron stars. The black hole, surrounded by a rotating disk of matter falling into it,...