Space observatory briefly blinded by record-breaking x-ray blast

Written by: Mamatha
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Washington, July 15 (ANI): A blast of the brightest X-rays ever detected from beyond our Milky Way galaxy's neighbourhood temporarily blinded the X-ray eye on NASA's Swift space observatory earlier this summer, astronomers have revealed.

The X-rays travelled through space for 5 billion years before slamming into and overwhelming Swift's X-ray Telescope on 21 June.







"The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down. So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn't count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami," said Phil Evans, a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Leicester, UK, who wrote parts of Swift's X-ray-analysis software.


The scientists then were able to measure the blast's X-ray brightness at 143,000 X-ray photons per second during its fleeting period of greatest brightness, which is more that 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky - a neutron star that is more than 500,000 times closer to Earth than the gamma-ray burst, and that sends a 'mere' 10,000 photons per second streaming toward Swift's telescopes.


The Swift scientists were able to estimate the overall brightness of GRB 100621A by sampling the photons at some distance from its overexposed centre - a standard correction technique. Scientists who study the Sun use a similar approach to observe the Sun's corona by blocking out its much-brighter centre.

Burrows said: "With this burst, we had to sample the photons twice as far from the centre as we ever had to go before. The correction factor for the X-rays from GRB 100621A was 168 times larger than for a typical gamma-ray burst and 5 times larger than for the brightest burst we previously had seen. We never thought we'd see anything this bright."


Evans, who was the first to see the processed data from the burst's initial blast, said: "When I first saw the strange data from this burst, I knew that I had discovered something extraordinary. It was an indescribable feeling when I realized, at that moment, that I was the only person in the whole universe who knew that this extraordinary event had occurred. Now, after our analysis of the data, we know that this burst is one for the record books." (ANI)

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