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gamma-ray bursts called gr bees for sure
are one of the biggest mysteries in
modern astronomy they're explosions that
release tons of highly energetic gamma
radiation but although we know they come
from outside the Milky Way scientists
aren't exactly sure how they happen they
are trying to figure it out though
especially since these bursts are
energetic enough to interfere with
satellites and astronauts in space but
there's a long way to go we've spent
more than 50 years trying to understand
GR bees and what's especially surprising
is that this mystery began on accident
thanks to of all things the Cold War the
story starts in 1963 when the US UK and
Soviet Union all got together and agreed
they wouldn't set off any nuclear bombs
in the atmosphere or in space of course
since this was right in the middle of
the Cold War it wasn't like everyone was
super trusting of each other so that
same year the US Air Force started
launching a bunch of monitoring
satellites collectively called Veiler to
help make sure everyone was following
the new rules
Beyla carried instruments to detect
x-rays gamma radiation and energetic
neutrons all things that could be
released by a nuclear test the
satellites also always orbited in pairs
so there was never an unobserved
hemisphere over the years they gathered
tons of data and some of it was pretty
unexpected in 1967 the veil of four
satellites picked up two big peaks of
gamma radiation first a tall sharp one
and then a lower broader one the good
news is they at least didn't seem to be
coming from Earth since the satellites
operated in pairs which everyone was
closer to a signal would detect it first
and that would help pinpoint its origin
but this time both satellites got
basically the same signal at the same
time so that wasn't anything to stop the
presses about it was just one event so
maybe the detectors malfunctioned but
that happen again and again
in fact by 1973 bayless 5 and 6 had
detected 16 more of these mysterious
gamma-ray bursts and scientists knew
this was a new phenomenon but that was
about all they knew
besides somewhere in space it still
wasn't clear where these GRBs were
coming from we didn't know if they were
from inside or outside the galaxy and
researchers certainly didn't know what
was causing them hypotheses covered
everything from supernovas to black
holes only in 1996 almost 30 years after
the first GRB detection did we finally
make some serious progress in figuring
things out that you're the
Italian and Dutch Space Agency's
launched Beppo sacks an Earth orbiting
spacecraft that monitored the skies for
things like gr bees specifically it was
equipped to detect something called
after glows after an object like a star
releases a big burst of energy there's
kind of a cool-down period where you can
see a sort of glow in lower wavelengths
after a GRB you'd expect an afterglow
with x-rays in visible light which could
take about a week to fade that Bo Sachs
had wide field cameras that could
pinpoint the location of a burst and
send that data to earth really quickly
fast enough that ground-based telescopes
could observe the afterglow and that
technology finally let us pin down the
location of a GRB
less than a year after launch Beppo sacs
detected a burst from some eight billion
light-years away
so definitely outside the galaxy and in
the years since we've found plenty of
others all far outside the Milky Way so
we know these bursts aren't from around
here now we just need to answer the
dozens of other questions based on the
observations we've made since 1967 we
think there are actually several types
of GR bees out there varying in
intensity and duration and that suggests
there may not be a single Universal
explanation for how they work it's
possible that some might involve
supernovas are merging neutron stars the
dense cores left over after a supernova
but there's a lot of gray area and a lot
we have left to learn to make things
more complicated we'll also never be
able to predict gr bees because we can't
know when something like a star is going
to die or when two stars are going to
merge together plus the events that
might lead to one of these bursts take
place on cosmological timescales
our lives are within the margin of error
for these processes if nothing else
though we do know a decent amount about
what happens when gamma rays interact
with earth all our detections of GR bees
let us know the kinds of energies we can
expect from them which lets us take any
necessary precautions to protect our
satellites and astronauts and we can
extrapolate from those detection and
model what might happen if earth were
closer to a burst all of which informs
how we understand habitability in the
universe realistically it we're a long
way from solving this cold war discovery
but we've learned a lot from the journey
- thanks for watching this episode of
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thanks for helping us explore the
mysteries of the universe if you'd like
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