Universe’s biggest explosions captured in unprecedented detail

An international team of scientists, including from the University of Bath, have captured the most complete picture yet of the most powerful type of explosion in the universe - Gamma Ray Bursts - unravelling the long-standing mystery of what powers them. Short-lived gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are intense flashes of high-energy light detected by space-based telescopes orbiting above the Earth's atmosphere. Their bright flashes are thought to represent the birth of a distant black hole, formed in the death throes of a massive star as it explodes as a supernova. But such prodigious energies have been hard to explain with standard explosion theories. Instead, scientists have long thought that the energy of magnetic fields could provide the answer. However proving this is a major technological challenge as these explosions lie many millions of light years from Earth and are gone in seconds or minutes, never to repeat. Until recently, traditional ground-based telescopes that require human intervention to make astronomical measurements have proven too slow to capture the fast-fading light from these transient explosions.