A treasure hunt for the origins of very high energy gamma rays
Today’s authors aim to answer the question: Where are very high energy gamma rays coming from?
Today’s authors aim to answer the question: Where are very high energy gamma rays coming from?
As part of our #BlackInAstro series for Black History Month, we interview Dr. Ronald Gamble, a theoretical astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center!
The first compelling association of an electromagnetic counterpart with an astrophysical neutrino since SN 1987A.
In today’s astrobite, we discuss the opacity of the Universe to high energy photons. The cosmic gamma-ray horizon, constrained by the authors of this paper, is a measure of this opacity, a cosmological probe and means of estimating blazar redshifts.
We think that blazars and gamma-ray bursts are both powered by extremely relativistic jets — but how is the kinetic energy of these jets transformed into the staggering amounts of radiation we observe?
What happens when a normally-dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy tears apart a passing star and burps it back out again in the form of a jet? The authors of this paper think that the Swift satellite has recently witnessed exactly this!