Astronomers cheekily called it the BOAT—“brightest of all time”—and began to squeeze it for information about gamma-ray bursts and the cosmos more generally. “Even 10 years from now there’ll be new understanding from this data set,” said Eric Burns, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University. “It still hasn’t quite hit me that this really happened.”
The initial analysis suggests that there are two reasons why the BOAT was so bright. First, it occurred about 2.4 billion light-years from Earth—fairly close for gamma-ray bursts (though well outside of our galaxy). It’s also likely that the BOAT’s powerful jet was pointed toward us. The two factors combined to make this the kind of event that occurs only once every few hundred years.
Perhaps the most consequential observation happened in China. There, in the Sichuan province, the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) tracks high-energy particles from space. In the history of gamma-ray burst astronomy, researchers have seen only a few hundred high-energy photons coming from these objects. LHAASO saw 5,000 from this one event. “The gamma-ray burst basically went off in the sky directly above them,” said Sylvia Zhu, an astrophysicist at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg.
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So far the LHAASO team has not released detailed results of their observations. Burns, who is coordinating a global collaboration to study the BOAT, hopes they do. “I’m very curious to see what they have,” he said. But he understands why a degree of wariness may be warranted. “If I were sitting on data that had even a few percent chance of being defining proof of dark matter, I would be extraordinarily cautious at the moment,” said Burns. If the photon can be linked to the BOAT, “it would very likely be evidence of new physics, and potentially dark matter,” Crnogorčević said. The LHAASO team did not respond to a request for comment.
Interesting to see where this goes. Axion-like particles are among the better motivated dark matter candidates.
From the article:
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