{"id":109969,"date":"2020-07-14T20:46:02","date_gmt":"2020-07-15T03:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/blinding-whole-galaxies-destroying-millions-of-worlds-rare-short-gamma-ray-burst-detected"},"modified":"2020-07-14T20:46:02","modified_gmt":"2020-07-15T03:46:02","slug":"blinding-whole-galaxies-destroying-millions-of-worlds-rare-short-gamma-ray-burst-detected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/blinding-whole-galaxies-destroying-millions-of-worlds-rare-short-gamma-ray-burst-detected","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBlinding Whole Galaxies, Destroying Millions of Worlds\u201d \u2013Rare Short Gamma Ray Burst Detected"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/blinding-whole-galaxies-destroying-millions-of-worlds-rare-short-gamma-ray-burst-detected.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A short gamma ray burst left the most-distant optical afterglow ever detected \u2013incredibly faint and fast signals sometimes lasting mere hours\u2013some 10 billion light years away, 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers suspect that up to one-third of all short gamma ray bursts come from merging neutron stars in globular clusters of old stars blinding whole galaxies with light and destroying millions of worlds. Known as SGRB181123B, it is the second most-distant well-established SGRB ever detected and the most distant event with an optical afterglow.<\/p>\n<p>The appearance of an SGRB at such an early time, report astronomers at the Keck Observatory and<a href=\"https:\/\/ciera.northwestern.edu\/2020\/07\/14\/short-gamma-ray-burst-leaves-most-distant-optical-afterglow-ever-detected\/\"> Northwestern University<\/a> could alter theories about their origins, particularly the length of time it takes two neutron stars to merge and produce these powerful explosions, as well as the rate of neutron star mergers in the young universe.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis was a very exciting object to study,\u201d said <a href=\"https:\/\/ciera.northwestern.edu\/directory\/kerry-paterson\/\">Kerry Paterson<\/a>, a postdoctoral associate at Northwestern University\u2019s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and lead author of the <a href=\"https:\/\/ciera.northwestern.edu\/2020\/07\/14\/short-gamma-ray-burst-leaves-most-distant-optical-afterglow-ever-detected\/\">study<\/a>. \u201cOur research now suggests neutron star mergers could occur surprisingly quickly for some systems \u2014 with neutron star binaries spiraling together in less than a billion years to create an SGRB.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A short gamma ray burst left the most-distant optical afterglow ever detected \u2013incredibly faint and fast signals sometimes lasting mere hours\u2013some 10 billion light years away, 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Astronomers suspect that up to one-third of all short gamma ray bursts come from merging neutron stars in globular clusters of old [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}