Scientists discover cause of brightest-ever burst of light

 

now researchers have found the brightest

burst of light ever recorded but have

unearth further Mysteries surrounding it

now the beam was 100 times brighter than

any scene before and came from an

exploding Supernova 2.4 billion light

years away but astronomers are said to

be stumped as to why this one was so

powerful because the star was relatively

small to make sense of this the

Professor Katherine Haymon

astronomer Royal for Scotland and

professor of astrophysics at the

University of Edinburgh says that this has been given the name

the boat the brightest of all time um it

s of smashed records in on astronomical

uh levels um in being as you said 100

times brighter than anything we'd seen

before in the gamma rays um so imagine

the Avengers Hulk with his gamma rays

that was what it emitted over a burst

that lasted seven minutes um

so us researchers have found that this

was caused by a supern

no  I guess maybe people might

remember the Oasis song The Smashing

supern noi well uh a supery is what

happens when a massive star dies um it

sort of collapses into uh what we think

might be a black hole and in that

explosion it creates a lot of light so

uh it was thought that because the boat

had been the brightest of all times in

gamma rays it would also have a really

really powerful supern noi but what

these researchers have confirmed is that

it was actually a pretty bog standard

supern noi which raises sort of lots of

questions of like well why did this

particular one appear so bright uh for

us observing it here on Earth so what

does all this mean then what can we kind

of read into it and then in the future

learn from it I guess yeah so um there

are they've estimated that this sort of

event would only happen one every 10,000

years so we're not going to get another

event like this um to compare with um so

there'll be lots of different types of

research going on more data taken the

other interesting thing that this us

team has found is that they expected to

see um lots of heavy chemicals around

this massive explosion so um I don't

know if you're married Kylie but um if

you do have a gold wedding ring um we

thought that that sort of heavy chemical

gold or platinum or uranium that would

be created in a massive explosive event

like this um but the US researchers

haven't found any evidence of that so

again it's another puzzle um with this

data they've answered one question what

caused this massive massive explosion in

our universe but it's left us with more

questions of well why isn't it what we

thought it would look like why aren't

there these heavy chemicals there why

isn't it as powerful as we thought it

would be um and and that's why we love

science because you never always get the

right answer and you have to go back to

the drawing board and and think more

deeply about the problem I quite like

the fact that this uh insignificant star

has such a a the brightest burst of

light ever recorded that's quite nice

isn't it Professor Katherine hymon we