Student satellite from Ireland captures its first Gamma Ray Burst

Science News

The Irish CubeSat detected its first and second gamma-ray bursts within a period of 80 minutes.

Illustration of EIRSAT-1. (Image Credit: ESA).

New Delhi: EIRSAT-1, a CubeSat built by students from Ireland and launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December last year has captured its first and second gamma-ray bursts within 80 minutes of each other. The satellite was launched as part of ESA’s educational ‘Fly your Satellite’ programme. The same events were also captured by other astronomical instruments, confirming the detections, and validating the performance of the Gamma-ray Module on board EIRSAT-1.

Lead researcher on the GMOD instrument, David Murphy said, “It’s astonishing to think that this satellite that we hand-built in our lab is now in space detecting photons that have travelled across the universe for billions of years to reach it.” The satellite was design, built and tested on the ground by the University College Dublin, under the guidance of the ESA. Considering how violent and energetic the gamma-ray bursts are, the GMOD instrument has a cutoff to avoid overloading the on-board computer because of the intense radiation around the poles of the Earth, improving the chances of detecting gamma-ray bursts from galactic sources.

What are gamma-ray bursts?

Gamma-ray bursts or GRBs are short periods of intense, high-energy radiation emitted by the most cataclysmic events in the universe, such as the birth of a black hole from a massive dying star known as a collapsar, or the mergers between two neutron stars. These gamma-ray bursts last for only seconds or at most a few minutes, but are bright enough to be spotted across intergalactic distances. The Inverse Square Law of Light can be used to determine the distances of the sources of GRBs, based on the luminosities of the energetic events in optical frequencies. The ground based European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile was used to conduct follow-up observations on one of the GRBs observed by EIRSAT-1, allowing the scientists to determine that the source was three billion light years away, and was caused by a neutron star merger.

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