‘Major’ feat by Chinese telescope as one of biggest cosmic blasts since big bang hits Earth

Intense gamma-ray burst from distant galaxy more than 2 billion years ago is captured by Chinese observatory on Tibetan Plateau

Detection by the Lhaaso observatory ‘a major scientific event’, says astrophysicist in Munich

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Located 4,410 metres above sea level, China’s Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (Lhaaso) consists of four types of detectors and spans 1.3 square km. Photo: AP

Published: 3:00pm, 21 Oct 2022Updated: 4:34pm, 21 Oct 2022

Astronomers around the world have just witnessed one of the most powerful explosions in the universe since the big bang, and they are racing to decipher and reveal the details.

More than 2 billion years ago in the direction of the constellation Sagitta, a massive, dying star exploded and collapsed into a black hole, spewing a fiery jet of light into space.

That jet, known as a gamma-ray burst, reached Earth on October 9 and was first spotted by a number of space telescopes scanning for cosmic explosions, including Nasa’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and China’s High Energy Burst Searcher (HEBS) and Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (Insight-HXMT).

The burst was so bright that it blinded the detectors of some telescopes and left them with completely white pixels, said HEBS chief scientist Xiong Shaolin, who is from the Institute of High Energy Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

The record-breaking space event, named GRB 221009A, was at least 10 times brighter than previous gamma-ray bursts and released the amount of energy that would take thousands of suns their entire lifetimes to produce.

The explosion was soon confirmed by China’s Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (Lhaaso), located on the Tibetan Plateau in Sichuan province.

Lhaaso chief scientist Cao Zhen, who is also with the institute in Beijing, said that among the thousands of light particles detected by the cosmic ray observatory within the first 30 minutes, the most energetic one reached 18 tera-electron-volts (TeV), which was “totally unexpected and extraordinary”.