Gamma Ray Bursts

Bright, Long-Lasting GRB Sets Energy Output Record

May 3, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Last weekend (April 27, 2013), the Fermi and Swift spacecraft witnessed a “shockingly” bright burst of gamma rays from a dying star. Named GRB 130427A, it produced one of the longest lasting and brightest GRBs ever detected. Because Swift was able [...]

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New Kind of Gamma Ray Burst is Ultra Long-Lasting

April 16, 2013

According to astronomer Andrew Levan, there’s an old adage in studying gamma ray bursts: “When you’ve seen one gamma ray burst, you’ve seen … only one gamma ray burst. They aren’t all the same,” he said during a press briefing on April 16 discussing the discovery of a very different kind of GRB – a [...]

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Integral: Ten Years Tracking Extreme Radiation Across the Universe

October 18, 2012

Caption: Artist’s impression of ESA’s orbiting gamma-ray observatory Integral. Image credit: ESA Integral, ESA’s International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory launched ten years ago this week. This is a good time to look back at some of the highlights of the mission’s first decade and forward to its future, to study at the details of the most [...]

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A Gamma-Ray Burst as Music

June 21, 2012

This is awesome. What would a gamma-ray burst sound like? No one really knows, but members of the team that work with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) have translated gamma-ray measurements into musical notes and have created a “song” from the photons from one of the most energetic of these powerful explosions, GRB 080916C [...]

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Fermi Gamma Ray Observatory Harvests Cosmic Mysteries

September 13, 2011

When it comes to high-energy sources, no one knows them better than NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Taking a portrait of the entire sky every 240 minutes, the program is continually renewing and updating its sources and once a year the scientists harvest the data. These annual gatherings are then re-worked with new tools to [...]

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