Astronomers have seen things you wouldn’t believe. Diaphanous auroras on other planets. Collapsing stars off the belt of Orion. The fringes of black holes seemingly on fire. But nothing has ever compared to the almighty force of what one astrophysicist calls “the energy monsters of the universe.”
Every now and then, observatories catch strange flashes lighting up the far-flung reaches of the cosmos. These cataclysmic explosions spray intense radiation and beams of energy through the universe at close to the speed of light. After the initial blast, which spews out gamma rays, a storm of radiation pours into the surrounding galaxy, creating a ferocious afterglow that burns in every part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Although these events have much in common with various science-fiction superweapons, they are entirely natural eruptions known as gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs. They are by far “the most extreme things in the universe,” says Eric Burns, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University.
Supernovae, the deaths of the most massive stars, are terrifically energetic. But they’re like firecrackers compared with GRBs, which typically emit energy equal to something like “a million, trillion, trillion times the Hiroshima bomb,” says Brendan O’Connor, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “In a few seconds they radiate the amount of energy that the sun produces over its entire lifetime.”
These horrifying yet beguiling events might just hold some secrets to understanding the universe. “The physics involved is extremely exotic,” says Charlie Kilpatrick, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University. Certain GRBs produce some of the heaviest elements in the periodic table, including gold. And their extreme, alien physics may help scientists elucidate how the first generation of stars and the first galaxies came to be. Their outpourings of light can be “used as probes of the distant universe,” says astrophysicist Peter Blanchard of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Astronomers are puzzled about how GRBs work. In the decades since the objects were first discovered, scientists knitted together a picture that they thought handily explained them. But in the past few years the yarn has begun unwinding. Two recently discovered long-lasting GRBs, which were thought to arise from massive explosions, seem to lack the traditional signs of a blast. Another GRB, by far the brightest one ever observed, did not appear to make any of the expected heavy elements.
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