Gamma Ray Burst May Have Been Two Supernovae — SkimNews
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- Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected GRB 220101A on New Year's Day 2022, and after four years of analysis, astronomers have proposed the event involved a cascade of multiple stellar collisions.
- Remo Ruffini of the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network led the team arguing the burst began when a carbon-oxygen core in a massive older star collapsed, releasing an accelerating cloud of electrons and positrons — a hypothetical event the team calls an "HB supernova" after physicist Homi Bhabha.
- The electron-positron cloud then struck a nearby white dwarf, causing it to collapse into a neutron star and trigger a second supernova blast just 3.5 seconds after the first.
- The second blast hit a third object — another neutron star — which released the event's brightest energy burst before collapsing into a black hole, while infalling material spun the newly formed neutron star into a pulsar rotating in milliseconds.
- Ryan Ridden of the University of Canterbury said Ruffini's model is "fascinating" but that the observations don't definitively support it and could equally fit a simpler scenario ending in a single black hole with no neutron star.
Why it matters: The four-year analysis of GRB 220101A shows even the brightest cosmic events can resist definitive explanation. Ruffini's team proposed a multi-stellar cascade — but independent expert Ryan Ridden noted the data don't rule out a simpler single-black-hole scenario, leaving the field without consensus on how to read the signal.
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