NASA has shut down its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, but don't panic; this is only a temporary pause for the space telescope that has served the space agency since 2004.
The most powerful events in the known universe – gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – are short-lived outbursts of the highest-energy light. They can erupt with a quintillion (a 10 followed by 18 zeros) times the luminosity of our Sun. Now thought to announce the births of new black holes, they were discovered by accident. The backstory […]
Stephen Lesage’s phone started vibrating just after halftime on Oct. 9, 2022, while he was watching a soccer game in Atlanta with a friend. When Lesage saw the incoming messages, the match no longer seemed important. There had been a rare cosmic event, and he needed to get to his computer immediately. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray […]
One of the most powerful events in our universe – Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) – behave differently than previously thought, and this evidence from observation of a GRB rules out most of the existing hypothetical predictions concerning the afterglow of the explosions.