War nichts mit dem "ältesten Gammastrahlenausbruch" im Universum.

Zitat

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The oldest gamma-ray burst ever discovered was just a piece of space junk

A sudden brightening in observations of the oldest known galaxy has a rather disappointing explanation.

Sometimes a flash is just a fluke.

A signal that scientists first believed was the ground-breaking discovery of a gamma-ray burst from the oldest known galaxy in the universe was in fact a reflection of sunlight from a spent rocket stage in Earth's orbit, a new paper has found.

The disappointing conclusion comes from a team of Polish scientists following a discussion involving several teams about the origin of the serendipitous sighting made by one of the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii in 2017. Whereas previous contributions to the debate focused on the probability of seeing a satellite compared to an extremely rare gamma-ray burst, the Polish team managed to track down the exact object that caused the flash — a spent Breeze-M upper stage from a Russian Proton rocket.

We checked our calculations against three other publicly available orbit calculation software," Michal Michalowski, an astronomer at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland and lead author of the new study, told Space.com.

So what exactly did the Keck telescope see and how is it even possible to mistake the most powerful flash of light in the universe taking place billions of light-years away for sunlight reflecting off a piece of space junk?

The team behind the original observation, led by scientists from the University of Beijing in China, set out to study one of the oldest galaxies in the universe. Known as GN-z11, the galaxy is more than 13 billion light-years away from Earth. That means telescopes can only see it as it looked some 420 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was very young.

The team used a near-infrared spectrograph called MOSFIRE mounted on one of the Keck telescopes. Instead of capturing images, the spectrograph measures the brightness of a celestial object at specific wavelengths of light. The team was taking three-minute measurements of GN-z11 when suddenly, the galaxy lit up. Within the next three minutes, however, the signal was back to normal.

After ruling out other possibilities, the scientists concluded that the sudden brightening must have been a gamma-ray burst, the brightest and most energetic flash of light in the universe believed to be produced by explosions of massive stars at the end of their lives, which astronomers call supernovas. Lasting only a few seconds, gamma-ray bursts briefly outshine everything else in the surrounding cosmos. But tracing their origins has so far been elusive.

The team published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy last December. The discovery seemed like a big deal. Scientists have never observed a gamma-ray burst in such an old galaxy, and seeing one would reveal new information about the early universe.

However, other astronomers soon started to question the findings, and two papers published Monday (Oct. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy lay out what went wrong.

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https://www.space.com/oldest-gamma-ray-b...ce-junk-mistake

Mich erinnert das spontan an die erste Erzählung von Stanislaw Lem, die mir untergekommen ist und das Interesse an diesem Autor auf Jahre verdarb. In der Geschichte "Die Patrouille" von 1959 entdeckt der Pilot Prix den Lichtpunkt eines unbekannten Flugobjekts und macht sich an die Verfolgung des ersten außeridrischen Raumschiffs quer durch Sonnensystem. Am Ende stellt sich heraus, daß nur eine Instrumenten-Fehlfunktion vorlag.