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March 29 (UPI) -- A gamma-ray burst, which lit up our galaxy last October, was the "brightest burst" ever seen and a once-in-10,000-year explosion, according to NASA. Astronomers have been studying the extragalactic burst, nicknamed BOAT for the "brightest of all time," for months after it triggered detectors on numerous spacecraft. NASA revealed astronomers' conclusions Wednesday, calling the Oct. 9 blast the brightest since the start of mankind.
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"It is just an absolutely monstrous burst. It is extremely extraordinary; we've never seen anything remotely close to it," Eric Burns, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University, told reporters at the 20th meeting of the American Astronomical Society's High Energy Astrophysics Division in Hawaii.
"The BOAT is a once-in-10,000-year event," Burns added. "So, there's a reasonable chance this is the brightest gamma-ray burst to hit Earth since human civilization began."
While the burst -- known as GRB 221009A -- was so bright it blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, scientists were able to reconstruct the information from data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The results were confirmed with data and analysis from Russian and Chinese teams. Together, they concluded that the burst was 70 times brighter than any others seen.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe, producing more energy than the sun will generate over its 10-billion-year lifetime.
Astronomers believe most occur when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight and forms a black hole, as seen in NASA's gamma-ray burst animation.
October's burst was considered a long GRB and lasted several minutes.
Researchers have been searching for a supernova at its origin, which was about 1.9 billion light-years from Earth, but have not found one yet using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope.
"If it's there, it's very faint."Andrew Levin, professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "We plan to keep looking, but it's possible the entire star collapsed straight into the black hole instead of exploding."
Scientists say the brightness did not necessarily have to do with the energy in the burst's jets, but rather the direction it was aimed.
"So then, why was it so bright? It turns out that all of the energy in this jet was focused into a very narrow angle. So, all of the particles moving in this jet were very, extremely narrowly beamed, and that narrow beam happened to be focused right at Earth," Kate Alexander, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, told reporters.
In addition to its brightness, October's gamma-ray burst is also only the seventh GRB to display X-ray rings, with triple the number ever seen. The echoes came from dust located between 700 and 61,000 light-years away.
"How dust clouds scatter X-rays depends on their distances, the sizes of the dust grains and the X-ray energies," said Sergio Campana, research director at Brera Observatory and the National Institute for Astrophysics in Merate, Italy.
"We were able to use the rings to reconstruct part of the burst's prompt X-ray emission and to determine where in our galaxy the dust clouds are located."
