NASA Spacecraft Detects the Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst of its Mission
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NASA Spacecraft Detects the Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst of its
Mission
September 26, 1996
While most of North America awakened to an otherwise
uneventful Tuesday morning, Marshall's Burst
and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) aboard NASA's Compton
Gamma-Ray Observatory detected the brightest gamma-ray burst in its
five and a half year mission. Shortly after 6:42 am CDT on September 24,
1996, the eight detectors that comprise the BATSE experiment were bombarded
with high energy gamma-radiation in the form of a colossal cosmic gamma-ray
burst. The image below shows a plot of the burst's brightness as a function
of time in two of the BATSE detectors.
Discovered by accident in the late 1960's, gamma-ray bursts are short-lived
blasts of gamma radiation that, if your
eyes could detect them, might look like giant flashbulbs going off in the
sky. Their locations in the sky are completely random, and their time of
occurrence is not predictable. Once thought to be located in our own Milky
Way Galaxy, most astronomers now believe that the bursts are actually located
at distances in excess of hundreds of millions of light-years, or near the
edge of the visible universe. At the intensity and distance that these bursts
are observed, they have to release as much energy in tens of seconds as
the Sun will produce in its entire ten-billion-year lifetime.
BATSE detects bursts at a rate of approximately one per day. However, this
particular burst is by far the most intense that BATSE has ever observed.
"This makes the event particularly interesting to scientists, as bursts
of this brightness are exceedingly rare and may contain information about
the sources that cannot be extracted from the weaker events," said
Dr. Charles Meegan of the BATSE Science Team. "We're just now beginning
to look at the data in detail and determine what other spacecraft were able
to see the burst. This will, in part, help us to obtain a more accurate
location in the sky for the event," Meegan added.
The Compton Observatory, containing BATSE, was launched aboard the space-shuttle
Atlantis on April 5, 1991 on STS-37.
Since its activation a few days later, BATSE has observed over 1700 cosmic
gamma-ray bursts, more than all previous experiments combined. It continues
today, monitoring the heavens for gamma-ray bursts, as well as providing
information on such exotic objects as neutron stars, binary pulsars, active
galactic nuclei, and other transient gamma-ray sources.
For more information on BATSE's brightest burst, please contact
Dr. Charles A. Meegan
NASA/MSFC Code ES84
Space Sciences Laboratory Huntsville, AL 35812
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HeadlinesAuthor: John
Horack
Curator: Bryan Walls
NASA Official: John M. Horack