Hey! It's your classic Saptarshi back again, umm lately I've thought about writing something exotic rather than just writing about Designing and Coding.
(FYI, I'm not a nerd as this blog gonna be nerdy at some really high levels :P)
The Heck Is It?
Imagine one fine Sunday morning, you chilling with your friends on your terrace, but this day isn't like a normal day on Earth. You see some bright beam of cosmic light approaching right towards Earth with the speed of light, the moment before you realize the heck is it, you get toasted off 🥵.
Checkpoint: Warning, explicit science content ahead, scroll at your own risk.
The Science Behind It
Gamma rays are basically electromagnetic radiations, 10th graders might know, they have the highest frequency and the least wavelength(less than 0.01nm) among all other electromagnetic radiations.
They are the most energetic E.M.radiation known till date, followed by X-rays and U.V. Radiation, one gamma-ray photon is more energetic than a million photons of visible light and energetic enough to break apart atomic bonds!
(Does that mean Gamma-rays can also break our DNA bonds 😱? Well, yes.)
But fortunately, we have our ozone layer which protects us from some levels of cosmic radiation including Gamma-ray Bursts.
Aight, are you wondering that how does one can even see a Gamma-Ray Burst lying onto the invisible spectrum?
Gamma-ray bursts focus their energy onto a specific wavelength. As a result, they are some of the most powerful events in the universe, and the explosions that create them are quite bright in visible light, too. One single Gamma-ray burst emits more energy than the Sun did in its entire lifetime, making it one of the brightest events of the universe!
Where do they come from?
Well, there are two types of Gamma-Ray Bursts, "Short" and "Long" and each has its own source.
Long Gamma-ray bursts last for about a second and are caused by supernovae, leaving behind the core as a black hole.
Short Gamma-ray bursts also last for a second and Scientists believe that they're caused when two neutron stars in a binary system finally collide into each other due to the Gravitational Forces (F=G(m1*m2)/r^2) between them leaving behind a black hole.
So, both Supernova and Neutron star merges leaves behind the same thing, a black hole. A Black Hole surrounded by a magnetized disc, and thus the rotation of the black hole winds up the magnetic field which creates a funnel, with particles traveling at a speed of light, the gas in the funnel creates a beam of celestial laser gun, "The Gamma-Ray Burst"!
Though most of the Gamma-Ray Bursts Scientists have spotted so far, are far enough to hurt our system, most of them were outside Milky Way Galaxy luckily. Even though a Gamma-Ray Burst originated pointing our solar system at quite a big number of light-years away from us is enough to wash up our solar system like a tidal wave.
By the time it reaches us it gets much widened to affect the whole of a solar system, umm guess I need to grab my pen for this.
The width gets widened as it approaches closer, increasing its range on the way having a greater chance to hit our system.
[Quick-Fax: Cosmic radars averagely observe at least one Gamma-Ray Burst per day.]
Even if the ozone layer saves us from a Gamma-Ray Burst, it will cause a large enough hole in the ozone layer, making us exposed to extremely harmful solar radiation :(
Maybe Gamma-Ray bursts cleaning up other extraterrestrial life on other galaxies on a regular basis :o as it's said that it's because of Gamma-Ray Bursts only 10% of the Galaxies is hospitable to life similar to us.
Some Of The First Sightings Of Gamma-Ray Bursts
On May 8, 1997, Hubble caught the visible fireball from a distant gamma-ray burst that doesn't appear to be surrounded by a host galaxy.
Are gamma-ray bursts common in normal galaxies? In 1997, Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 captured GRB 970228's visible glow, the first that linked a gamma-ray burst with a specific host galaxy. Astronomers estimate the GRB’s host galaxy’s redshift is 0.835, which corresponds to a distance of hundreds of millions of light-years.
In 2003, the VLBA snapped this radio image of 2.6-billion-light-years-distant GRB 030329.
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope spied the highest-energy light ever seen from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) on April 27, 2013. This image compares the sky in high-energy gamma rays during a three-hour interval prior to the event (left) with a three-hour interval between 2.5 hours before the blast and 30 minutes of the blast, called GRB 130427A.
By the way, after such grinding talks, why not relax a bit and listen to how the universe sounds like, with a Gamma-Ray Burst in it 👀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wvPe9OA1qA&feature=youtu.be
A gamma-ray burst, the most energetic explosions in the universe, converted to music. Made by Sylvia Zhu (music) and Judy Racusin (animation)
A Note from the video: In the beginning of the song, before the burst starts, the harp plucks out a few lonely notes. After about half a minute, the piano joins in on top of the harp background, and the notes begin to pile on more and more rapidly. The cello enters the scene as the burst begins in earnest.
We created an accompanying animation to help see what is happening. The top panel shows each individual gamma-ray. The colors refer to low (red), medium (blue), and high (green) quality gamma-rays (played by harp, cello, and piano respectively). The energy of the gamma-ray is on the y-axis (higher energy gamma-rays are towards the top of the plot) and the arrival time of the gamma-rays are on the x-axis (later arriving gamma-rays are further to the right). The vertical white line tells you where the music is currently playing. The bottom panel shows the number of gamma-rays (which is the number of notes played) in each time slice.
By converting gamma rays into musical notes, we have a new way of representing the data and listening to the universe.
Taking Leave
Guess I'm done with my Gamma-Ray Bursts today. There's a good chance I made some errors somewhere, please feel free to correct me in the comment section(I genuinely read those 👀).
umm, can you please show some love to me UwU, just by liking the post! And also let me know if I should write more exotic blogs like this...
Keep up into my track at
Github -> github.com/imsaptarshi
Discord -> discord.gg/mXQ9BfqjVD
Twitter -> twitter.com/imsap_
Thanks to Kurzgesagt, Nasa Blogs & Astronomy.com for all the data which made this article possible.
Alright, Bye.
Happy Vacations,
Peace Out ✌️,
Saptarshi Basu.