Astronomers capture detailed information about exceptional gamma radio burst

An international research team, including astronomers from the UK, USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, and South Africa, captured detailed information about a gamma radio burst (GRB), dubbed the brightest of all time (BOAT), aka GRB 221009A, just three hours after the massive explosion.

For the unversed, Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest and most energetic explosions known to occur in the universe. They can last from a few milliseconds to several minutes and shine about a million trillion times as bright as the Sun.

The team used the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), operated by the SETI institute, and other radio telescopes worldwide to investigate the violent interaction between the jet and circumstellar medium, providing valuable information.

"It's exciting to witness the ATA participating in a worldwide effort to study one of the most interesting and bright supernova explosions. We owe this success to the original specification of the ATA and the refurbishment program that transformed its analog and digital capabilities," said Dr. Wael Farah, project scientist for the Allen Telescope Array.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected GRB 221009A in October 2022. The signal from GRB 221009A had travelled an estimated 1.9 billion years to reach Earth. Astronomers have been studying the BOAT for the past six months across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in California was one of the first radio telescope instruments to record data on this source, only a few hours after the event happened, the SETI Institute said in a statement on Tuesday.

"Our ability to rapidly respond to this event with a range of radio telescopes has been instrumental in understanding the early-time behaviour of relativistic jets and demonstrates the importance of such observing flexibility when developing new facilities," said Dr. Joe Bright, on of the two post-doctoral researchers from Oxford University who led the research on the earliest stages of the Universe's most powerful explosions.