Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have completed testing for BurstCube, a shoebox-sized spacecraft designed to study the universe’s most powerful explosions. Members of the team have also delivered the satellite to their partner Nanoracks (part of Voyager Space) in Houston, Texas, where it will be packed for launch. […]
Why would astronomers want to eclipse the Sun? - Astronomy gsusigmanu.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gsusigmanu.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
New research helps resolve the mystery surrounding strange long gamma-ray bursts, suggesting these blasts of high-energy radiation emerge from collisions of neutron stars that birth black holes.
In recent years, certain luminous extragalactic optical transients have been observed to last only a few days1. Their short observed duration implies a different powering mechanism from the most common luminous extragalactic transients (supernovae), whose timescale is weeks2. Some short-duration transients, most notably AT2018cow (ref. 3), show blue optical colours and bright radio and X-ray emission4. Several AT2018cow-like transients have shown hints of a long-lived embedded energy source5, such as X-ray variability6,7, prolonged ultraviolet emission8, a tentative X-ray quasiperiodic oscillation9,10 and large energies coupled to fast (but subrelativistic) radio-emitting ejecta11,12. Here we report observations of minutes-duration optical flares in the aftermath of an AT2018cow-like transient, AT2022tsd (the ‘Tasmanian Devil’). The flares occur over a period of months, are highly energetic and are probably nonthermal, implying that they arise from a near-relativistic
India s AstroSat space telescope has detected over 600 Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB), marking the death of a massive star or merging of neutron stars. The detection is a significant milestone, demonstrating the continued undiminished performance of the Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI) eight years after its launch.