Earth was hit by a huge gamma ray burst (GRB), video

The explosion caused a significant disturbance in our planet’s ionosphere. Analysis of the effects of the GRB could provide information on mass extinctions that have occurred in Earth’s history

At 2.21pm CET on 9 October 2022, an extremely bright and long-lasting gamma-ray burst (GRB) was detected by several of the high-energy satellites orbiting near Earth, including ESA’s Integral mission . The International Laboratory for Gamma-ray Astrophysics (Integral) was launched by ESA in 2002 and has been detecting gamma-ray bursts almost every day since then. However, GRB 221009A, as it was called the explosion, was anything but ordinary.

The GRB

Statistically, a GRB as powerful as GRB 221009A arrives at Earth only once every 10,000 years. During the 800 seconds that the gamma rays impacted, the explosion provided enough energy to activate detectors in India. Instruments in Germany detected signs that the Earth’s ionosphere was disturbed for several hours by the explosion. This extreme amount of energy gave the team the idea to look for the explosion’s effects on Earth’s ionosphere. The ionosphere is the layer of Earth’s upper atmosphere that contains electrically charged gases called plasma. It extends from approximately 50 km to 950 km altitude.

Past impacts

In the past, GRBs have been spotted hitting the lower ionosphere at night but never at the top. This had led to the belief that by the time it reached Earth, a GRB explosion was no longer powerful enough to produce a change in ionospheric conductivity that led to a change in the electric field. This time the effect was clear and strong. For the first time ever, they saw an intense disturbance in the form of a strong electric field variation in the upper ionosphere.

GRB from a very distant galaxy

This particular GRB took place in a galaxy nearly 2 billion light-years away and yet it still had enough energy to affect Earth. Although the Sun is typically the primary source of radiation powerful enough to affect Earth’s ionosphere, this GRB activated instruments generally reserved for studying immense explosions in the solar atmosphere known as solar flares.

In the worst case scenario (e.g. closer GRBs), the explosion would not only hit the ionosphere, but could also damage the ozone layer, allowing dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the Sun to reach the Earth’s surface. This effect is hypothesized to be a possible cause of some of the mass extinction events known to have occurred on Earth in the past. But to delve deeper into the idea, we’ll need a lot more data. Below, here is the GRB simulation:

Source