NASA Fermi and Swift see 'shockingly bright' burst

The maps in this animation show how the sky looks at gamma-ray energies above 100 million electron volts with a view centered on the north galactic pole. 

The first frame shows the sky during a three-hour interval prior to GRB 130427A.

The second frame shows a three-hour interval starting 2.5 hours before the burst, and ending 30 minutes into the event. 

The Fermi team chose this interval to demonstrate how bright the burst was relative to the rest of the gamma-ray sky.

This burst was bright enough that Fermi autonomously left its normal surveying mode to give the LAT instrument a better view, so the three-hour exposure following the burst does not cover the whole sky in the usual way. 

Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

A record-setting blast of gamma rays from a dying star in a distant galaxy has wowed astronomers around the world.

The eruption, which is classified as a gamma-ray burst, or GRB, and designated GRB 130427A, produced the highest-energy light ever detected from such an event.

"We have waited a long time for a gamma-ray burst this shockingly, eye-wateringly bright," said Julie McEnery, project scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"The GRB lasted so long that a record number of telescopes on the ground were able to catch it while space-based observations were still ongoing."

Just after 3:47 a.m. EDT on Saturday, April 27, Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) triggered on eruption of high-energy light in the constellation Leo.

The burst occurred as NASA's Swift satellite was slewing between targets, which delayed its Burst Alert Telescope's detection by a few seconds.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) recorded one gamma ray with an energy of at least 94 billion electron volts (GeV), or some 35 billion times the energy of visible light, and about three times greater than the LAT's previous record.

The GeV emission from the burst lasted for hours, and it remained detectable by the LAT for the better part of a day, setting a new record for the longest gamma-ray emission from a GRB.

Swift's X-Ray Telescope took this 26.5-second exposure of GRB 130427A at 3:50 a.m. EDT on April 27, just moments after Swift and Fermi triggered on the outburst. The image is 6.5 arcminutes across. 

Credit: NASA /Swift /Stefan Immler

The burst subsequently was detected in optical, infrared and radio wavelengths by ground-based observatories, based on the rapid accurate position from Swift.

Astronomers quickly learned that the GRB was located about 3.6 billion light-years away, which for these events is relatively close.

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers think most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse under their own weight. As the core collapses into a black hole, jets of material shoot outward at nearly the speed of light.

Stefan Immler

The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time.

If the GRB is near enough, astronomers usually discover a supernova at the site a week or so after the outburst.

This animation shows a more detailed Fermi LAT view of GRB 130427A. The sequence shows high-energy (100 Mev to 100 GeV) gamma rays from a 20-degree-wide region of the sky starting three minutes before the burst to 14 hours after.

Following an initial one-second spike, the LAT emission remained relatively quiet for the next 15 seconds while Fermi's GBM instrument showed bright, variable lower-energy emission. 

Then the burst re-brightened in the LAT over the next few minutes and remained bright for nearly half a day. 

Credit: NASA /DOE /Fermi LAT Collaboration

Neil Gehrels

"This GRB is in the closest 5 percent of bursts, so the big push now is to find an emerging supernova, which accompanies nearly all long GRBs at this distance," said Goddard's Neil Gehrels, principal investigator for Swift.

Ground-based observatories are monitoring the location of GRB 130427A and expect to find an underlying supernova by mid-month.

Dying supergiant stars implicated in hours-long gamma-ray bursts

GRB 111209A exploded on Dec. 9, 2011. 

The blast produced high-energy emission for an astonishing seven hours, earning a record as the longest-duration GRB ever observed. 

This false-colour image shows the event as captured by the X-ray Telescope aboard NASA's Swift satellite. 

Credit: NASA/Swift/B. Gendre (ASDC/INAF-OAR/ARTEMIS) 

Three unusually long-lasting stellar explosions discovered by NASA's Swift satellite represent a previously unrecognised class of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).

Two international teams of astronomers studying these events conclude that they likely arose from the catastrophic death of supergiant stars hundreds of times larger than the sun.

Swift Satellite

The astronomers discussed their findings Tuesday at the 2013 Huntsville Gamma-ray Burst Symposium in Nashville, Tenn., a meeting sponsored in part by the University of Alabama at Huntsville and NASA's Swift and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope missions.

GRBs are the most luminous and mysterious explosions in the universe.

The blasts emit surges of gamma rays—the most powerful form of light—as well as X-rays, and they produce afterglows that can be observed at optical and radio energies.

Swift, Fermi and other spacecraft detect an average of about one GRB each day.

"We have seen thousands of gamma-ray bursts over the past four decades, but only now are we seeing a clear picture of just how extreme these extraordinary events can be," said Bruce Gendre, an ASI researcher.

Three recent GRBs (blue dots) emitted high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray light over time spans up to 100 times greater than typical long bursts and constitute a new ultra-long class.

This plot compares the energy received and the event duration among different classes of transient high-energy events: long GRBs (green); the disruption of an asteroid or comet by a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole in our own galaxy, or the break-out of a supernova shock wave in another galaxy (orange); and the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole in another galaxy (purple). 

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, after B. Gendre (ASDC/INAF-OAR/ARTEMIS)

Traditionally, astronomers have recognized two GRB types, short and long, based on the duration of the gamma-ray signal. Short bursts last two seconds or less and are thought to represent a merger of compact objects in a binary system, with the most likely suspects being neutron stars and black holes.

Long GRBs may last anywhere from several seconds to several minutes, with typical durations falling between 20 and 50 seconds.

These events are thought to be associated with the collapse of a star many times the sun's mass and the resulting birth of a new black hole.

Both scenarios give rise to powerful jets that propel matter at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions.

As they interact with matter in and around the star, the jets produce a spike of high-energy light.

Gendre and his colleagues made a detailed study of GRB 111209A, which erupted on Dec. 9, 2011, using gamma-ray data from the Konus instrument on NASA's Wind spacecraft, X-ray observations from Swift and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite, and optical data from the TAROT robotic observatory in La Silla, Chile.

The burst continued to produce high-energy emission for an astonishing seven hours, making it by far the longest-duration GRB ever recorded.

The team's findings appear in the March 20 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.