Space
We Just Saw an ‘Extraordinary’ Millennium Space Explosion
A record-breaking gamma-ray burst detected in October 2022 has now been described as a once-in-a-thousand-year event.
It’s called GRB 221009A, and with up to 18 teraelectronvolts of energy packed into its light emissions, it’s considered the most powerful gamma-ray burst ever recorded.
We’ve been waiting to learn more about this incredible explosion, and now the analyses have begun to arrive on the preprint server arXiv, with a trio of papers submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
According to the analyses, this extraordinary burst breaks the rules: the light curve of its afterglow doesn’t fit neatly into theoretical descriptions of how it should go, suggesting that there’s something interesting and unique about GRB 221009A.
To recap, gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe, erupting in fire and fury so powerful that they release more energy than the sun would in 10 billion years. The bursts of electromagnetic radiation are caused by cataclysmic events: the supernova or hypernova explosions of massive stars at the end of their lives, or the collision of binary systems containing at least one neutron star.
GRB 221009A was first detected on October 9, 2022, and was initially thought to be a low-power X-ray flash from a relatively nearby source. However, follow-up observations revealed that the flash came from much farther away than first thought – 2.4 billion light-years (which still makes it one of the closest gamma-ray bursts ever detected) – meaning that it was also much more powerful than first thought.
For the first 73 days after the initial discovery, astronomers watched it eagerly, tracking the evolution of its light curve, the shape the intensity of the light makes on a graph over time. They had to stop after about 70 days as the afterglow moved behind the Sun, but it is expected to reappear around now.
Light echoes from the gamma-ray burst, produced by the light traveling through thick dust as it moves towards us, creating an “expanding ring” effect. (Williams et al., arXiv, 2023)
In a paper led by Maia Williams of Pennsylvania State University, a team of astronomers found that the X-ray afterglow of GRB 221009A immediately after the burst was the brightest ever detected by the Swift observatory, by an order of magnitude. In a simulation of randomly generated bursts, only one in 10,000 was as powerful as GRB 221009A.
When distance was taken into account, the brightness of GRB 221009A was consistent with other gamma-ray bursts in the Swift catalog. Others simply appear dimmer because they’re farther away. According to the team’s calculations, it’s the combined characteristics of GRB 221009A that make it very rare indeed.
“We estimate,” they write, “that GRBs as energetic and nearby as GRB 221009A occur at a rate of ≲1 per 1000 yr – making this a truly remarkable opportunity that is unlikely to be repeated in our lifetimes.”
What makes the GRB truly peculiar is the evolution of the afterglow, which doesn’t fit the standard theory. Gamma-ray bursts are typically followed by a glow from electrons traveling at near-light speeds. This is called synchrotron emission, and it’s the result of the shocks that form as the initial explosion slams into the interstellar medium.
The gamma-ray bursts themselves are thought to consist of energy concentrated in parallel beams that form highly collimated jets. Studying the resulting synchrotron emission can help astronomers figure out the shape of the explosion and the jets.
According to Williams and her team, the afterglow suggests that either the jet structure of GRB 221009A is more complicated than expected, or it’s not tightly collimated. The latter scenario, they say, will have profound implications for the energy budget of the event.
In another paper, led by Tanmoy Laskar of the University of Utah, a team of astronomers suggests that the peculiar afterglow could mean that there’s an additional source of synchrotron emission in the gamma-ray burst’s afterglow, but the implications could be more serious. The problem, they suggest, may be something fundamentally wrong with the theory of synchrotron afterglows.
And a third paper, led by astronomer Manisha Shrestha of the University of Arizona, finds that the afterglow doesn’t contain some of the features you’d expect to see in a supernova explosion. This, they note, could mean that most of GRB 221009A’s energy budget was spent on the jets, leaving very little to suggest that an exploding star was responsible.
The afterglow is expected to re-emerge from behind the Sun this month, and should still be very visible to our telescopes at several wavelengths. Whatever is going on with this strange explosion, astronomers will be working very hard to get to the bottom of it.
The research papers have all been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and are available on preprint server arXiv. They can be found here, here, and here.
Did you know NASA has finally revealed the truth about the fake moon landings?
Mainstream media barely reported on the astonishing revelations, so most people remain none the wiser about what NASA has admitted in the last 12 months.
The truth of the matter is NASA has all but admitted the landings were fake, and anybody who works in the space industry or has any knowledge about rocket science has quietly accepted that the whole thing was a charade. So why the hell is nobody talking about this?
We literally didn’t go to the moon in 1969 and, to this day, no human being — American, Russian, Chinese or ancient Egyptian — has been past lower earth orbit which is about 1000 miles above sea level.
That’s right, no human being has ever been higher than 1000 miles above sea level… Except for those times we “went to the moon” which is 240,000 miles away. And guess what, we did that in 1969! When a computer with the computing power of a TI-89 graphing calculator was the size of a house. We didn’t even have the technology for VCRs yet. We didn’t even have microwaves.
Fast forward to today, over 50 years later, when an iPhone 12 has more computing power than every single computer on Earth in 1969 COMBINED.
And yet…. NASA claims that we can’t go back to the moon because we have “lost the technology” to go to the moon. Apparently it was “destroyed” but they won’t tell us how or why.
Hmm… Seems legit.
But it gets even worse.
Tired of people asking to analyze the original moon landing tapes, NASA had to admit they had LOST them. Then the story changed and they claimed they had TAPED OVER THE ORIGINAL MOON LANDING TAPES because of budget cuts.
Apparently they have since found the original tapes in a suburban garden shed in Las Vegas. Conveniently for NASA, they weren’t found in a Hollywood basement used by Stanley Kubrick.
Because let’s face it, how likely is it that NASA would actually tape over the original footage of mankind’s greatest achievement? Because of budget cuts, really?
And the fact that the TV broadcast, watched by hundreds of millions, was not sent directly to TV stations but was rather a projection of the broadcast off a wall which was then recorded and sent out, doesn’t sound like NASA are covering their tracks or anything.
Let’s face facts. Everything that was done 50 years ago is a thousand times cheaper and easier to do today. Are we actually expected to believe that we went to the moon in this piece of shit 50 years ago? I’ve seen homeless encampments on Skid Row that have more insulation. I’ve seen Met Gala costumes that look sturdier than that.
It’s all so implausible. Who shot the event from outside the capsule? How is the American flag waving? Why do the shadows look like they are the result of multiple light sources? Why is the letter C visible on one of the rocks? (which happens to look like a prop on a film set)?
And don’t forget about the time NASA astronaut Alan Shepard supposedly sneaked a golf club and some balls onto Apollo 14 and played golf on the moon. Hold on, how do you sneak a golf club onto a space craft when every cubic inch and ounce is accounted for?
He sneaked it up his ass, obviously.
Really, let’s think about this rationally. In 1969 we sent a tiny homeless tent covered in aluminum foil 250,000 miles away to a precise location, when even being 1/10000 of an inch off in any part of the launch would have caused the ship to miss the moon by thousands of miles…. And yet, we landed it, we played golf… And now we can’t even get humans past 1000 miles above sea level.
Perhaps the final word should go to Buzz Aldrin. According to Buzz, we didn’t go to the moon at all! But he didn’t stop there. Listen to what he says about the hundreds of millions of people around the world who were affected by the moon landing. It’s call mass formation psychosis. The elite have been using this technique to brainwash the masses since 1969.
(Article by Baxter Dmitry republished from NewsPunch.com)
A video of a strange black object that appears to be a cube was filmed this week on Tuesday at an unspecified location in Texas, USA.
According to the unnamed author of the video, he and his wife looked up at the sky as a military plane that looked like an F-111 bomber flew west to east right over their house.
They regarded this incident as very unusual, since military aircraft had previously very rarely appeared in their area.
But they were even more confused when, literally “seconds later” after the bomber’s passage, a dark object appeared in the sky.
At first it seemed to them spherical, but then they considered that it was more like a cube. It is also possible that the object has changed its shape.
In the video, a man can be heard saying, “It’s so weird. A military plane flies by, and then THIS appears, whatever it is,” to which his wife replies, “I have no idea what it is.”
It is indicated that the man sent the video he shot to the UFO site MUFON. The eyewitness also admitted that the strange object could be something mundane, such as a baby balloon, but he thinks that this “air anomaly” emits some kind of glow, which is clearly not related to the properties of balloons.
In his opinion, this “glow” may be associated with the propulsion system of the aircraft.
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