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rocketsocks t1_je3uy7c wrote

Reply to comment by ryschwith in NASA Missions study what may be a 1-In-10,000-Year Gamma-ray Burst, the most powerful class of explosions in the universe. On Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022, a pulse of intense radiation swept through the solar system so exceptional that astronomers quickly dubbed it the BOAT – the brightest of all time. by ICumCoffee

That's just how many GRBs happen. There are certain kinds of stellar deaths which result in the collapse of an extremely massive star into a black hole. As a considerable chunk of the rest of the star gets swallowed by the black hole it forms into an accretion disk and the rotation creates high energy axial jets. The axial jets contain super energetic material being propelled at close to the speed of light, this creates a relativistic effect which substantially increases the brightness of the emitted energy near the axis of the beam. Many of these events occur throughout the universe routinely, projecting intense gamma ray beams across billions of lightyears. When Earth happens to be in one of these beams we detect a gamma ray burst.

This particular event wasn't inherently exceptionally bright, nor exceptionally close (it was about 1.9 billion lightyears away), but we were basically directly in the brightest part of the beam, which is very narrow.

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HungJurror t1_jebecsx wrote

do we see them happen when they aren't pointed somewhat at us? like, if there is nothing for the light to reflect off of we won't see the light right? like in the case of one pointed perpendicular to us, for example

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rocketsocks t1_jecguyt wrote

We won't see them as gamma ray bursts but we might see them as supernova (or hypernova) events, but only much closer.

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