gamma ray burst merger

A beacon at the edge of the galaxy blinks without a schedule: sometimes silent for years, sometimes emitting hundreds of flares in a single day. Such a beacon needs a watchman who never sleeps and never gets distracted.

A particle with an energy of $$10^{18}$$ eV hitting Earth's atmosphere is like a tennis ball traveling at 200 km/h slamming into a wall. Astrophysicists have debated for decades where such projectiles come from. Gamma-ray bursts, brief and powerful explosions of gamma radiation, have long been suspected as accelerators.

The night sky is full of rings and bubbles, but in the radio band they look different. In data from the Australian radio telescope ASKAP, a structure has surfaced that resembles two soap bubbles blown from the same straw.

An avalanche in a sandpile starts with a single grain. No one knows exactly where it will slip or how big the slide will be. But if you keep pouring sand, the pile itself reaches a state where avalanches of all sizes, from tiny trickles to massive collapses, follow the same law.

The night sky looks smooth, but it's actually clumpy — vast communities of galaxies that bend light from distant objects like lenses. When a short, powerful radio burst goes off somewhere in the universe, its path to an Earth telescope can pass near such a clump.

The universe is like a vast invisible scaffold. We don't see it directly, but we know it's there: galaxies and clusters hold together thanks to it. This scaffold is dark matter. The most popular version says it is "cold," made of heavy, slow-moving particles.

In June 2024, the CHIME radio telescope recorded over 700 radio bursts per hour from source FRB 20240114A. Such a hyperactive repeater releases in one hour nearly all the magnetic energy of a typical magnetar (a neutron star with an ultra-strong field).

The Universe is humming, but our ears catch only the bass. LIGO hears the rumble of black hole mergers — the infrasound of space. Higher up, in the gigahertz range, the flutes and violins of primordial gravity ring out.

In the depths of the Universe, when a massive star collapses into a black hole or a magnetar is born, a gamma-ray burst flares up — for an instant, it outshines all the stars in the observable Universe.

Two neutron stars spiral closer and collide. The result: a gravitational wave, a ripple in spacetime, a short gamma-ray burst, and a faint glow astronomers call a kilonova. But sometimes the signal passes by a massive galaxy.

The cosmic spectacle unfolds on the stage of Galaxy галактики Centaurus A. In the lead role: a supermassive сверхмассивная чёрная дыра with a powerful jet that pierces space for hundreds of thousands of light-years.

The light of a distant star is no perfect beacon. Passing through the gravitational field of another star, it bends, splits, and magnifies, creating a fleeting Einstein ring in the sky. This is how gravitational microlensing manifests, predicted by Fritz Zwicky back in the 1930s.

When two neutron stars, the ultra-dense cores of dead stars, collide, a kilonova is born: an explosion a thousand times brighter than a typical nova. This is the universe's true smelting works. In the scorching cloud racing outward at near-light speeds, a furious flux of neutrons transmutes atomic nuclei into gold, platinum, osmium.

The universe speaks in the language of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself.

In the center of almost every large galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole, whose gravitational abyss was first mathematically described by Karl Schwarzschild. When it swallows gas, a dazzling active nucleus is born — a quasar.

Two neutron stars, ultra-dense remnants of massive stars, merge into one, and the space around them shudders: a gravitational wave is born, a ripple in the very fabric of spacetime. Almost simultaneously, a narrow stream of matter, the jet, erupts from the scene.

Gravitational-wave detectors picked up a strange burst — the signal GW241011. Two black holes merged, but the pair looked unusual: one hole was about three times lighter than the other, and the system as a whole was spinning rapidly. Such a combination is a rare guest in the catalogs.

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are the universe’s powerhouses: their X-ray coronae blaze millions of times hotter than stellar atmospheres. But what strikes the spark? A ten-day X-ray campaign by the XRISM and XMM-Newton satellites, aimed at NGC 3783, provided the answer: it’s actual thunderstorms.

In the boundless night of space, galaxies come together in a slow gravitational dance, merging into one. Such collisions are not head-on impacts but rather like fingers moving slowly through water, leaving swirls and tails behind.

The enigma of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is not just a question of 'what exploded?' It’s a drama of energy transfer under extreme conditions, where the slightest stumble leads to collapse.

LIGO and Virgo detectors catch ripples in spacetime, but some signals force us to rewrite the scripts of stellar death. GW190814 — the merger of a black hole of 23 solar masses with a compact object of 2.6 solar masses — is a discordant chord in the symphony of standard models.

Hidden in the globular cluster Terzan 5 is the binary system IGR J17480-2446. One of its members is a neutron star that behaves strangely. It spins at just 11 hertz (11 revolutions per second) and cools suspiciously slowly after an outburst. Usually, such stars spin hundreds of times faster and cool briskly — here, it's the opposite.

A hum resonates across the universe. It is not sound, but a trembling of space itself — the gravitational wave background. It is produced by pairs of supermassive black holes circling each other at the centers of distant galaxies. Each pair is like a bass instrument in a vast orchestra.

Blazars are long-lasting beams from black holes at the centers of galaxies. Gamma-ray bursts are the briefest flashes from supernova explosions or neutron star mergers. The former act like eternal spotlights, the latter like camera flashes.

At the heart of nearly every large galaxy lives a supermassive black hole — a silent giant around which stars, gas, and other, smaller black holes orbit. From time to time, one of these objects breaks free from its orbit and begins to fall toward the central monster in a tightening spiral.

A tightly twisted phone cord snaps and scatters sparks. Magnetic fields on the Sun behave the same way: they twist, break, and reconnect, powering flares. For the first time, astronomers have witnessed this process directly. One loop was twisted by 540 degrees — one full turn and then half again. That’s three times more than previously thought possible.

A shockwave erupts from the star's surface, and for a brief moment, a blinding flash of ultraviolet and X-rays is born. This very event, named EP260321a, was spotted by the Einstein space telescope in March 2026. The light took about 450 million years to reach Earth.

A radio telescope is not just an antenna, but a computing machine that builds an image from millions of equations. This mathematical prism is as fragile as glass: one wrong digit in the calibration, and the real sky splits, spawning phantom sources.

The Universe is singing. Not in the usual sense: its symphony is recorded in tiny density variations from which galaxies and ourselves grew. After the Big Bang, space was almost uniform, but quantum fluctuations during inflation left a faint pattern — slightly more matter here, slightly less there.

In the constellation Scorpius, 3,000 light-years from Earth, a dead star steals matter from a living one. A white dwarf in the system IGR J17014-4306 — a superdense carbon-oxygen ball with the mass of the Sun but the size of Earth — siphons hydrogen from a normal companion star.

The stellar halo of the Milky Way is a galactic palimpsest: an ancient manuscript where earlier layers lie hidden beneath the visible text. For a long time, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE) structure was thought to be the final entry in this manuscript, the scar of a single catastrophic merger.

It was Edwin Hubble who discovered that galaxies are rushing apart, and Georges Lemaître linked this to the expansion of space. Today, the ΛCDM model, relying on dark energy and dark matter, asserts that the Universe is flat as a perfectly stretched canvas.

The first two billion years after the Big Bang were an era when the universe resembled a boiling construction pit. Dark matter clumped the gas together, igniting the first stars. It seemed there simply wasn't enough time to assemble massive elliptical galaxies—'dormant' stellar metropolises — from this raw material.

Two neutron stars whirl in their final dance. If their spin aligns with their orbital motion, the partners merge neatly, launching a narrow jet of superheated matter. If they spin in opposite directions, the dance breaks apart, scattering a thick shroud of debris.

A giant black hole tore apart a star, leaving behind a lopsided disk of scorching gas — like a vinyl record warped by the heat. Now a tiny black hole (or a star) zips around and repeatedly pierces that disk. Each puncture is a bright X-ray flare.

Many black holes are surrounded by magnetic fields. As it spins, the black hole drags curved spacetime along with it, like a machine's flywheel, and sets the cosmic factory in motion.

A flashlight doesn't cast a uniform circle of light; it has a bright spot in the center and a blurred halo at the edges. If you switch it off quickly, the edges are the last to fade, and by how the light dies, you can guess the shape of the reflector.

A light bulb that doesn't burn out but flares brighter and brighter until it blows the whole fixture apart. That's roughly how the most massive stars in the universe die. When a star's core heats up to billions of degrees, pairs of particles (electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons) begin to form.

In 2017, detectors picked up a tremor in space — gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars. At the same moment, telescopes saw a flash. For the first time, one event spoke in two languages at once: light and gravity.

When a neutron star and a black hole merge, they send out gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime that reach Earth. These ripples carry the imprint of their final dance: the orbit before the collision is often elongated, like an ellipse.