On Sunday, October 9, 2022, such an incredibly intense pulse of radiation passed through the solar system that astronomers immediately named it the brightest BOAT of all time. The source was a gamma ray burst (GRB), the most powerful class of explosion in the universe. The flare triggered numerous spacecraft and observatories around the world. By analyzing all this data, astronomers can now identify how bright it is and better understand its scientific impact.

“GRB 221009A was probably the brightest X-ray and gamma-ray burst since the dawn of human civilization,” said Eric Burns, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He analyzed about 7,000 gamma-ray bursts, mostly detected by NASA’s Fermi Space Gamma-ray Telescope and Russia’s Konus instrument aboard NASA’s Wind spacecraft, to determine how often such bright events might occur. Their answer: once every 10,000 years.

The flare was so bright that it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, meaning they were unable to directly record the true intensity of the radiation. American scientists were able to reconstruct this information based on Fermi data. They then compared the results with those of a Russian team working on the Konus data, and those of Chinese teams analyzing observations from the GECAM-C detector on the SATech-01 satellites and instruments at the Insight-HXMT observatory. Together, they proved that the explosion was 70 times brighter than anything seen so far.

Burns and other scientists presented their new BOAT findings at the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting in Waikoloa, Hawaii. Observations of the flare cover a wide spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, and include data from numerous NASA missions and partners, including the NICER X-ray telescope on the International Space Station, NASA’s NuSTAR observatory, and even Voyager 1 in interstellar space. . Articles describing the results presented are included in the main issue. Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The signal from GRB 221009A was emitted about 1.9 billion years before it reached Earth, making it one of the closest known “long” GRBs with the initial or instantaneous emission lasting more than two seconds. Astronomers believe these flashes represent the birth cries of black holes, which are formed when the cores of massive stars collapse under their own weight. Rapidly absorbing the surrounding matter, the black hole shoots jets in opposite directions containing particles that have reached nearly the speed of light. These jets emit X-rays and gamma rays as they pierce the star and fly out into space.