A huge gamma-ray burst
| Nugget | |
|---|---|
| Number: | 199 |
| 1st Author: | Andre Csillaghy |
| 2nd Author: | David Smith |
| Published: | May 2, 2013 |
| Next Nugget: | TBD |
| Previous Nugget: | Three-phase life leads to corpulent X-ray loops |
Introduction
RHESSI's lack of background-reducing collimation means that its Ge detectors can see most the entire gamma-ray sky, noting that the Earth looms large from low Earth orbit, blocking off a major fraction at any given time. Mostly the gamma-ray sky, though bright in absolute terms, is not detectable by RHESSI because of its lack of heavy anticoincidence shielding.
Still, a bright enough cosmic transient can readily be seen, and RHESSI has particularly good characteristics (high gamma-ray spectral resolution, high temporal resolution, and good livetime measurements). So it was not surprising when GCN Circular 14448 announced the bright gamma-ray burst that we report here. These remarkable astronomical phenomena burst onto the scene secretly, detected originally by the military Vela satellites designed to record terrestrial tests of nuclear weapons. Note that we have already described RHESSI's observations of magnetars and GRBs in earlier Nuggets: ([1,] [2], [3]).