As an example of what I wrote about yesterday -- that the universe is amazing enough without having to make shit up to embellish it -- today I want to tell you about one of the latest discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.
First, a bit of background.
I've written here before about gamma-ray bursters -- the phenomenon that one astronomer described as "second only to the Big Bang as the most energetic phenomenon known." They ordinarily last between a few seconds and a couple of minutes, and during that time release more energy than the Sun will in its entire ten-billion-odd-year-long life. Interestingly, the cause is unknown. Various models have suggested the phenomenon might result from two neutron stars spiraling into one another, a stellar hypergiant undergoing core collapse, or energy release from a magnetar. Or, possibly, more than one of the above.
We simply don't know.
Whichever it turns out to be, you would not want to be looking down the gun barrel of one of these things when it went off. It's thought that a hundred or so light years would be what is terrifyingly known as the "kill zone." Farther off, though, it could still be catastrophic; there's some suspicion that the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction -- one of the "Big Five" mass extinctions, and second only to the Permian-Triassic "Great Dying" event in terms of magnitude -- was caused by a nearby gamma ray burst.
Fortunately, there's nothing close to us that looks capable of doing this. All of the ones we've observed have been in other galaxies, where they register as blips in the gamma ray region of the spectrum on powerful telescopes, and pose no threat to us here. Which is a good thing, because heaven knows we have enough else to worry about at the moment.
Anyhow, that's all background. An astrophysicist at Rutgers University was analyzing data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope last July, and discovered something mind-boggling -- a gamma-ray burster called GRB 250702B, located in a galaxy eight billion light years away. But its distance, and the fact that we could see it from that far away, isn't the wildest thing about it. You remember how I said that most gamma-ray bursters have a duration of between a few seconds and a minute or two? And during that time they exceed the Sun's entire lifetime energy output?
This one lasted for seven hours.
That, my friends, is what the astrophysics community refers to as "a metric fucktonne of energy." I can't even wrap my brain around how humongous this thing was, and I have a bachelor's degree in physics, so you'd think I'd be able to handle big numbers.
In my defense, neither, apparently, can the astrophysicists. Eliza Neights, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said it was like "nothing we've ever seen before." And whatever it was, it's left behind nothing much visible to study. "In such vibrant and unprecedented detail, we see just one very large galaxy with a dust lane," said Huei Sears of Rutgers, who led the study. "The galaxy has such complex structure that it's not a hundred percent clear if there's anything left to see of the explosion, but if there is, it's really faint."
One suggestion is that this outburst was the result of a tidal disruption event -- a massive star, or possibly a neutron star, being ripped to shreds as it spirals into a black hole.
Because that's not a terrifying scenario to think about.
But the fact is, the scientists are struggling to explain what could have caused a cataclysm of this magnitude. It doesn't fit with known models, and there's the exciting possibility that in order to account for it, we might be in the realm of "new physics."
In any case, here's a nice example of the fact that we don't need to add anything fringe-y to the universe to make it weird and scary and astonishing. Real science does that just fine on its own.
I mean, I don't know how you could even dream up something wilder than a seven-hour-long energetic burst that makes the Sun look like a wet firecracker. All I can say is that when Shakespeare talked about "there are more things in Heaven and Earth... than are dreamt of in your philosophy," he was not engaging in hyperbole.
