An international team of researchers has just announced a unusual discovery and surrounded by mystery. This is the detection of a unprecedented gamma ray burst that has taken place in the highest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere. This event, which occurred more than 500 kilometers from the surface of our planet, lasted only seven minutes but ended up causing disturbances for more than ten hours. Everything indicates that it is the strongest such explosion ever detected in the atmosphere of our planet.
As explained by the experts in an article published this Tuesday in the scientific journal ‘Nature Communications’, the phenomenon took place on October 9, 2022. That is, a little over a year ago. The burst was detected at the time by several radio telescopes around the world. Now, 13 months later, a exhaustive analysis of the collected data both by the satellites that were orbiting the planet at that time and by the international network of magnetic observatories (INTERMAGNET, a global consortium dedicated to measuring the variations in the Earth’s magnetic field in real time) allows us to better understand what happened after this mysterious space explosion.
He gamma ray burst It is one of the cosmic phenomena that produce the most energy: it is estimated that they release more than the sun in 10,000 million years
energy bursts
Gamma ray bursts are one of the cosmic phenomena that produce the most energy. It is estimated that these events release more energy than our sun would do in 10 billion years. These types of explosions also produce extraordinary jets of light that, at first, permeate space and, later, They leave a faint glow in the surrounding regions.
These events could indicate the birth of a black hole billions of kilometers away
Its origin is not clear but, according to some experts, could indicate the birth of a black hole or neutron star. There are also other hypotheses that suggest that it could reflect the process by which two neutron stars merge with each other or when a neutron star merges with a black hole.
Impact on Earth
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But what happened in October of last year for a gamma ray burst to reach our planet’s atmosphere? The first hypotheses suggest that this event was nothing more than a reflection of an explosion that took place at more than 2 billion light years from our planet, illuminated a large part of our galaxy and, finally, ended up permeating the Earth’s atmosphere. It is not clear what caused this process but, as its impact on Earth reflects, everything indicates that it was very powerful.
The explosion has been called by researchers as ‘The boat’ and, as explained in the article published this Tuesday, it caused large disturbances in the electric field of the ionosphere. This, in turn, could affect different technological systems that orbit in this region, such as the GPS servicesthe terrestrial communication satellites and the radio transmission systems. These alterations caused by this cosmic event lasted about ten hours after the initial burst.