Dark Gamma Ray Bursts
This is simply an amazing image; the universe is truly incredible and much stranger than science fiction. Gamma-ray bursts are one of the many of the natural phenomenon in the universe that could eradicate life on Earth. Back when I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson in February, he mentioned that almost everything in the universe has the ability to kill us, they don’t however because they are simply so far away; a fact that creationist rarely acknowledge when they argue that the universe is designed solely for us.
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe’s biggest explosions, capable of producing so much light that ground-based telescopes easily detect it billions of light-years away. Yet, for more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over the nature of so-called dark bursts, which produce gamma rays and X-rays but little or no visible light. They make up roughly half of the bursts detected by NASA’s Swift satellite since its 2004 launch.
Using one of the world’s largest optical telescopes, the Keck I in Hawaii, researchers looked for unknown galaxies at the locations of 14 Swift-discovered dark bursts.
In this image, dense knots of dust in otherwise normal galaxies dim the light of a dark gamma-ray burst (center). The dust absorbs most or all of a burst’s visible light but not higher-energy X-rays and gamma rays.
Image Credit NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet
