Last year, telescopes around the world registered the brightest cosmic explosion of all time. Astrophysicists can now explain what made it so dazzling.

Few cosmic explosions have attracted as much attention from space scientists as the one recorded on October 22 last year and aptly named the Brightest of All Time (BOAT). The event, produced by the collapse of a highly massive star and the subsequent birth of a black hole.

A black hole is a place in space where the gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape it. Astronomers classify black holes into three categories by size: miniature, stellar, and supermassive black holes. Miniature black holes could have a mass smaller than our Sun and supermassive black holes could have a mass equivalent to billions of our Sun.

When black holes and other enormously massive, dense objects whirl around one another, they send out ripples in space and time called gravitational waves. These waves are one of the few ways we have to study the enigmatic cosmic giants that create them.

Astronomers have observed the high-frequency “chirps” of colliding black holes, but the ultra-low-frequency rumble of supermassive black holes orbiting one another has proven harder to detect. For decades, we have been observing pulsars, a type of star that pulses like a lighthouse, in search of the faint rippling of these waves.

Today, pulsar research collaborations around the world – including ours, the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array – announced their strongest evidence yet for the existence of these waves.

“This gamma-ray burst was extremely bright. We expect to see one like this only every 10,000 years or so.”

A team of astronomers led by the University of Alabama in Huntsville has detected the brightest gamma-ray burst.

These bursts are thought to be among the most luminous explosions in the universe and created during the birth of black holes. GRBs generally last from less than a second to several minutes.

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The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) has announced that three researchers associated with the UAH Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) have discovered a gamma-ray burst (GRB) approximately 2.4 billion light-years away in the constellation Sagitta that ranks as the brightest ever observed. Believed to have been triggered by collapse of a massive star, it is accompanied by a supernova explosion, giving birth to a black hole.

Dr. Peter Veres, an assistant professor with CSPAR, Dr. Michael S. Briggs, CSPAR principal research scientist and assistant director, and Stephen Lesage, a UAH graduate research assistant, collaborated on the discovery and analysis of the gamma-ray burst. The researchers operate the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System. The GBM is an instrument in low-Earth orbit aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope that can see the entire gamma-ray sky not blocked by the Earth and hunts for GRBs as part of its main program.

The development of the GBM and analysis of its data is a collaborative effort between the National Space Science and Technology Center in the U.S. and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. The instrument is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL.