Two Gamma-Ray Bursts Emit Highest Energy Photons Ever Seen From GRBS
via SyFy
For two recent GRBs (as those in the know call them) even that wasn’t enough. These two emitted individual photons with the highest energies ever seen. One of them zapped out gamma rays with energies of up to a teraelectronvolt — equivalent to about 500 billion times the energy of photons our eyes detect!
This is important, because astronomers had predicted these kinds of energies could be achieved in GRBs, but it had never been seen before. These observations help us understanding what’s going on not just with the GRB itself, but how the expanding material in one interacts with the environment around it.