The Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Ever Recorded Rattled Earth's Atmosphere

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October 27, 2022

Dear Reader, This week, we're spooked. Not just because it's almost Halloween, but also because of a recent celestial event. Earlier this month, the brightest and closest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever seen washed over Earth, as our lead story details. Although its source—likely a dying massive star giving birth to a black hole—was some two billion light-years away, the GRB was still powerful enough to briefly agitate our planet's upper atmosphere, stripping sufficient numbers of electrons from atoms in the rarefied air to interfere with radio waves passing through. This may seem a mere curiosity—until you realize the bone-chilling implications of a GRB occurring much closer to us in the universe. As wonderful as it was to witness such a bright and beautiful GRB, we should all be glad these cataclysmic explosions are keeping their distance from our quiet corner of the cosmos. Elsewhere this week, we have stories on the "spooky" physics behind this year's physics Nobel Prize (and a bizarre technique called "quantum pseudotelepathy"), haunting images of spiraling dust around a star, monstrous microbes that could survive frightful conditions on Mars for hundreds of millions of years, and more. Enjoy—and happy (early) Halloween! Try not to eat too much candy.

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Astronomy The Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Ever Recorded Rattled Earth's Atmosphere The death of a massive star far across the universe affected lightning on our planet and could teach us about the Milky Way By Phil Plait

Quantum Physics Researchers Use Quantum 'Telepathy' to Win an 'Impossible' Game A new playful demonstration of quantum pseudotelepathy could lead to advances in communication and computation By Philip Ball

Astronomy Dazzling New JWST Image Shows Dusty Stellar Spirals A new JWST image of a star surrounded by strange, rippling spirals reveals a hidden chapter in the story of how dust spreads across the cosmos By Phil Plait

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Quantum Physics The Beauty at the Heart of a 'Spooky' Mystery Quantum entanglement seems like it shouldn't be possible, but experiments from 2022 Nobel Prize winners based on John Bell's work tell us otherwise By John Horgan

Planetary Science Space Station Experiment Maps Earth's Methane 'Super Emitters' NASA's EMIT instrument has found more than 50 methane super emitters in its first few months of operation—and that's not even its main job By Mike Wall,SPACE.com

Planetary Science Earthly Microbes Might Survive on Mars for Hundreds of Millions of Years An organism nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium" may have what it takes to live on Mars By Keith Cooper,SPACE.com

Education To Fight Misinformation, We Need to Teach That Science Is Dynamic Science is a social process, and teaching students how researchers work in tandem to develop facts will make them less likely to be duped by falsehoods By Carl T. Bergstrom,Daniel R. Pimentel,Jonathan Osborne

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 327, Issue 5

QUOTE OF THE DAY "Wave functions, superposition and other esoterica remind me that this is a strange, strange world; there is a mystery at the heart of things that ordinary language can never quite capture." Science writer John Horgan, on the "spooky" nature of the subatomic realm.

FROM THE ARCHIVE Record-Breaking Gamma Rays Reveal Secrets of the Universe's Most Powerful Explosions Two teams of astronomers using ground-based telescopes to study gamma-ray bursts have detected the highest-energy light ever seen from celestial sources By Lee Billings | November 2019

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