{"id":181327,"date":"2024-01-24T18:22:25","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T00:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/mysterious-gamma-ray-burst-from-the-early-universe-puzzles-astronomers"},"modified":"2024-01-24T18:22:25","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T00:22:25","slug":"mysterious-gamma-ray-burst-from-the-early-universe-puzzles-astronomers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/mysterious-gamma-ray-burst-from-the-early-universe-puzzles-astronomers","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious gamma-ray burst from the early universe puzzles astronomers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mysterious-gamma-ray-burst-from-the-early-universe-puzzles-astronomers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A recent discovery of a Gamma-ray burst (GRB) named GRB 220627A has left astronomers puzzled. GRBs are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, and typically last only seconds to a few minutes. However, GRB 220627A lasted for more than a thousand seconds, or just shy of 17 minutes, and arrived in two powerful bursts from an unknown event 2 billion years into the universe\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n<p>While the source of the burst appears to be ordinary, its length and double-burst nature have left astronomers puzzled. The likeliest explanation is that the GRB is the product of gravitational lensing, which is the warping of distant light sources by extremely massive objects such as galaxies and black holes. This would stretch, distort, and create echoes of the GRB\u2019s signal before it arrived at Earth.<\/p>\n<p>When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses before exploding outward in a gigantic supernova, leaving behind an ultra-dense neutron star or a black hole. It is these stellar explosions \u2014and occasionally even collisions between two neutron stars \u2014 that produce powerful bursts of gamma rays that can be picked up by space observatories such as NASA\u2019s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which detected the new GRB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent discovery of a Gamma-ray burst (GRB) named GRB 220627A has left astronomers puzzled. GRBs are the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, and typically last only seconds to a few minutes. However, GRB 220627A lasted for more than a thousand seconds, or just shy of 17 minutes, and arrived [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181327","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\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}