Mark Megahan
Gamma ray bursts “are the most energetic explosions seen in the universe.” Despite frequent detonations of all sorts, the universe doesn’t see a whole lot of those special ones. Scientists thought they stumbled on the holy grail and it turned out to be a discarded Styrofoam cup.
A bogus Gamma burst?
Space may be big and mostly empty but it’s also full of giant explosions. Cosmic bursts range from common stellar flares at one end of the scale, “where stars suddenly release magnetic energy,” to the other extreme of “neutron star mergers, where two dense stars collide together.”
We get solar flares all the time, from our own sun. They mess with electronic communications. Gamma rays are really nasty.
The light we can see with our eyes as the colors of the rainbow are the frequencies smack in the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum. You can’t see radio waves but if you could, they would be the reddest shade imaginable. Microwaves are higher on the scale followed by infrared.
Most folks are familiar with that frequency from heat lamps. Up above violet is Ultraviolet, the “black light” popular with hippies in the 60’s for making things glow in the dark. X-rays pass right through your body but get scattered by bones. Gamma rays are the ultimate in royal purple, blasting out energy at phenomenal levels.
The first time scientists discovered a burst of gamma rays, they were using military satellites to study “nuclear tests in the upper atmosphere.” They think they come from “massive stars undergoing huge explosions when they run out of fuel.”
That doesn’t happen very often. When it does, the blasts are “so energetic they can be seen in galaxies many billions of light years away.” Recently, some astronomers thought they caught one.
Much closer to home
The good news is that the Earth didn’t get a direct hit. “A gamma ray burst pointed directly at the Earth would probably lead to a mass extinction event, and the end of civilization as we know it.” Just the stray particles from a near miss are nerve wracking. There hasn’t been one detected from inside our own galaxy yet.
In 2020, observers using Hawaii’s Keck telescope published a paper suggesting they “had discovered a new burst in the most distant known galaxy.” The astronomers “observed strips of the sky, and happened to see a bright flash, just a few seconds long, in one of their exposures.” Models “ruled out the possibility that it was a natural or human-made satellite close to home.”
They also ruled out “a number of other astronomical explanations, and concluded that the most likely explanation was, indeed, a gamma ray burst.”
Because “the team pinpointed the direction of the event and found it was coming from the same area as a galaxy known as GN-z11, which just so happens to be the most distant and oldest galaxy we’ve yet discovered,” the whole scientific community went spastic. They jumped to the conclusion that these powerful bursts “were more common in the very early universe.” Then they found out the real reason.
A new paper recently published in Nature busts the bubble. “The researchers used a public space-track website to search for possible human satellite interference in the direction and at the time of the flash detection.”
What they found was that around “the time that the original team were studying the sky, a Russian proton rocket reached low Earth orbit and released its upper stages (dubbed Breeze-M), which then became space junk, orbiting the Earth.” By looking at “the orbit of the space debris and matching with the observations taken in the original study,” the new team explained the alleged gamma ray flash as “the upper stage falling past the part of the sky the telescope was observing.” Sorry guys.
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