Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2020

20 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 SPACE CHRONICLES the highest energy ever observed: 1Tera electron volt (TeV) — about one trillion times as much energy per photon as visible light. Scientists have been trying to observe such very high energy emission from GRB’s for a long time, so this detec- tion is considered a milestone in high-energy astrophysics. Previous observations revealed that to achieve this energy, material must be emitted from a collapsing star at 99.999% the speed of light. This ma- terial is then forced through the gas that surrounds the star, causing a shock that creates the gamma-ray burst itself. For the first time, scien- tists have observed extremely ener- getic gamma rays from this partic- ular burst. Several ground- and space-based observatories have set out to study GRB 190114C. European astronomers were pro- vided observing time with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe the gamma-ray burst, to study its environment and find out how this extreme emission is pro- duced. “Hubble’s observations sug- gest that this particular burst was Hubble studies gamma-ray burst with the highest energy ever seen by NASA/ESA G amma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe. They emit most of their energy in gamma rays, light which is much more energetic than the visible light we can see with our eyes. In January 2019, an extremely bright and long gamma-ray burst (GRB) was detected by a suite of tel- escopes, including NASA’s Swift and Fermi telescopes, as well as by the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescopes. Known as GRB 190114C, some of the light detected from the object had