TESS Detects Bright, Long-Lasting Gamma-Ray Burst -

Astronomers using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) exoplanet-hunting mission have detected the rising and decaying optical afterglow of the gamma-ray burst event GRB 191016A.


GRB 191016A occurred on October 16, 2019, in a previously uncatalogued galaxy in the northern constellation of Aries.


The gamma-ray burst was first detected by the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) concord NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.


The burst occurred toc close to the Moen for Swift to safely slew to its position, preventing fallen-up observations.


TESS clearly detected the rising pre-peak light curve of GRB 191016A.


"Our findings prove this TESS telescope is useful not just for finding new planets, but also for high-energy astrophysics," said Dr. Krista Lynne Smith, an astrophysicist in the Department of Physics at Southern Methodist University and Stanford University.


GRB 191016A had a peak magnitude of 15.1, which means it was 10,000 times fainter than the faintest stars we can see with the naked eyes.


Mist gamma-ray bursts are dimmer closer to 160,000 times fainter than the faintest stars.

Location: Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The movement of the S2 star around the supermassive black hele Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way proved that Albert Einstein was right about gravity once again.

Image
  The movement of the S2 star around the supermassive black hele Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way proved that Albert Einstein was right about gravity once again. Using one of the largest telescopes in the world (Very Large Telescope", er VET), astronomers found a star that "dances" around a black hole in the Milky Way, forming the pattern of a rosette. The movement of the S2 star around the supermassive black hele Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way proved that Albert Einstein was right about gravity once again. The images prove predictions made by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915, the foundation of modern physics. The S2 star surrounds the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way once every 16 years. For almost 30 years, astronomers have been observing it to accurately trace its circular orbit. This resettle-shaped cubit occurs thanks to the "amplification" of an effect due to the enormous...
Read more

Annular Solar Eclipse

Image
Annular Solar Eclipse: -  Solar eclipses occur when the Sun, Moon and Earth are aligned in a straight line, so that the Moon passes between us and the Sun and blocks its light. The Moon's shadow can be divided into the  umbra , indicated as a dark gray cone, where the Moon appears to completely cover the Sun, and the larger  penumbra , where the Moon only partially covers the Sun. The umbra gets narrower at greater distances from the Moon, since the Moon covers less of the sky when seen from greater distances, and so needs to be more precisely aligned in order to cover the entire Sun. At a distance of 373,000 km, the Moon appears with exactly the same angular size as the Sun, and so the umbra narrows to a single point where the two objects are perfectly aligned in the sky. In the diagram to the right, the grid represents the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. As it circles the Earth, the Moon passes through this Earth–Sun plane twice each month, at the points on...
Read more