Never-Before-Seen Way to Annihilate a Star | NOIRLab

Never-Before-Seen Way to Annihilate a Star | NOIRLab

Cosmoview Episode 71: This artist's impression illustrates how astronomers studying a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) with the Gemini South telescope, operated by the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, may have detected a never-before-seen way to destroy a star. Unlike most GRBs, caused by exploding massive stars or the chance mergers of neutron stars, astronomers have concluded that this GRB came instead from the collision of stars or stellar remnants in the jam-packed environment surrounding a supermassive black hole at the core of an ancient galaxy.

Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, M. Garlick, M. Zamani, K. O Chul, ESO/L. Calçada, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab, N. Bartmann

Duration: 1 minute, 12 seconds

Release Date: Sept. 26, 2023

#NASA #Astronomy #Space #Science #GRB #Stars #NeutronStars #StellarExplosions #StellarRemnants #Galaxies #Cosmos #Universe #GeminiSouthTelescope #GeminiObservatory #Chile #NOIRLab #AURA #NSF #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #HD #Video