The JWST confirms that a supernova was behind the brightest gamma ray burst ever detected. But where are the heavy elements?
This artist's visualization of GRB 221009A shows the narrow relativistic jets that gave rise to the gamma-ray burst and the expanding remains of the original star ejected via the supernova explosion. Credit: Aaron M. Geller / Northwestern / CIERA / IT Research Computing and Data Servicesgamma-ray burst
Now, we detect about one GRB daily, and they’re always in distant galaxies. Astrophysicists struggled to explain them, coming up with different hypotheses. There was so much research into them that by the year 2,000, an average of 1.5 articles on GRBs were published in scientific journals daily. ” The lead author is Peter Blanchard, a Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow.
This periodic table from the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio shows where the elements come from, though scientists still have some uncertainty. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center “It’s not any brighter than previous supernovae,” lead author Blanchard said. “It looks fairly normal in the context of other supernovae associated with less energetic GRBs. You might expect that the same collapsing star producing a very energetic and bright GRB would also produce a very energetic and bright supernova. But it turns out that’s not the case. We have this extremely luminous GRB, but a normal supernova.
“There is likely another source,” Blanchard said. “It takes a very long time for binary neutron stars to merge. Two stars in a binary system first have to explode to leave behind neutron stars. Then, it can take billions and billions of years for the two neutron stars to slowly get closer and closer and finally merge. But observations of very old stars indicate that parts of the universe were enriched with heavy metals before most binary neutron stars would have had time to merge.
“Upon examining the B.O.A.T.’s spectrum, we did not see any signature of heavy elements, suggesting extreme events like GRB 221009A are not primary sources,” lead author Blanshard said. “This is crucial information as we continue to try to pin down where the heaviest elements are formed.”
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