HUNTSVILLE – Sarah Dalessi, a fifth-year student in the College of Science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, is the lead author of a paper on arXiv detailing the discovery of the fastest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded.
GRB 230307A is a gamma-ray burst in the ultrarelativistic category, meaning the velocity of the GRB’s jet, a focused beam of high-energy particles and photons, came within 99.99998 percent of the speed of light – 186,000 miles per second – making it the fastest GRB ever observed. The observation was made possible with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, one of two instruments on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
“The Lorentz factor is the measure of speed of the jet here, and 1,600 is the highest we ever measured,” said Dr. Peter Veres, an assistant professor who works in the UAH Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research and is co-author on the study…