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In July 1967, at the height of the Cold War, American satellites that had been launched to look for Soviet nuclear weapons tests found something wholly unexpected. The Vela 3 and 4 satellites observed brief flashes of high-energy photons, or gamma rays, that appeared to be coming from space. Later, in a 1973 paper that compiled more than a dozen such mysterious events, astronomers would dub them gamma-ray bursts. “Since then, we’ve been trying to understand what these explosions are,” said Andrew Taylor, a physicist at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg.
Quanta Magazine
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The age of multi-messenger astronomy
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NASA has chosen four small-scale astrophysics missions â including one led at Marshall Space Flight Center â for further concept development in a new program called Pioneers. Through small satellites and scientific balloons, these selections will enable new platforms for exploring cosmic phenomena such as galaxy evolution, exoplanets, high-energy neutrinos, and neutron star mergers.
âThe principal investigators of these concept studies bring innovative, out-of-the-box thinking to the problem of how to do high-impact astrophysics experiments on a small budget,â Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASAâs Science Mission Directorate, said. âEach of the proposed experiments would do something no other NASA telescope or mission can do, filling important gaps in our understanding of the universe as a whole.âÂ
NASA Missions Unmask Magnetar Eruptions in Nearby Galaxies
On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on several NASA and European spacecraft. Now, multiple international science teams conclude that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar located in a neighboring galaxy.
This finding confirms long-held suspicions that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – cosmic eruptions detected in the sky almost daily – are in fact powerful flares from magnetars relatively close to home.
“This has always been regarded as a possibility, and several GRBs observed since 2005 have provided tantalizing evidence,” said Kevin Hurley, a Senior Space Fellow with the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, who joined several scientists to discuss the burst at the virtual 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “The April 15 event is a game changer because we foun