On New Year鈥檚 Day in 2022, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected a from a distant galaxy. After four years of analysis, a group of astronomers has proposed a dramatic story for the burst of light 鈥� known as GRB 220101A 鈥� in which a collapsing star triggered the formation of both a pulsar and a black hole.
The event began, according to a team led by , an astronomer at the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network in Italy, with the collapse of the core of a massive older star, which had earlier been transformed via nuclear reactions into a mix of carbon and oxygen.
When the carbon-oxygen core exploded, the researchers argue that an accelerating cloud of electrons and positrons was released in a hypothetical event that they call an 鈥淗B supernova鈥� after the late physicist , who studied collisions of those particles. This cloud then ran into a nearby white dwarf, causing it to collapse and become a neutron star. The white dwarf鈥檚 collapse triggered a second supernova blast 3.5 seconds after the first.
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Then, this second blast hit a third nearby stellar object, another neutron star. As a consequence, the neutron star released a further dramatic burst of energy, the brightest of the entire event, before collapsing to become a black hole.
Meanwhile, fast-moving material continued to fall onto the new neutron star, causing it to spin faster and faster, until it was twirling around in a matter of milliseconds, becoming a pulsar, a star whose fast spin and magnetic field produce regular beams of light. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the most complex system ever observed in astrophysics,鈥� says Ruffini.
Other experts aren鈥檛 so sure, though.
鈥淩uffini et al., put forward a fascinating idea for the origin of GRB 220101A. However, as always, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,鈥� says at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. 鈥淓ven with the fantastic data available for GRB 220101A, the observations don鈥檛 definitively support this novel model鈥�, and could equally well fit a story that ends with a single black hole and no neutron star.
arXiv
