NASA needs your help to identify massive explosions in space. The space agency is calling on citizen scientists to become "burst chasers" by joining a project to interpret gamma-ray bursts across the universe and "decode what the universe is saying," according to a release. Huge amounts of energy are released through gamma ray bursts (GRBs), which have mysterious origins but are thought to be linked to the collapse of huge stars or the merging of neutron stars billions of light-years away, per the Washington Post. Such bursts, detected in pulses that vary in shape and intensity, could offer clues about how the universe was formed. "We need your help to classify these pulses for more clues of what they really are!" says Amy Lien, principal investigator of the "Burst Chaser" project.
In signing up, amateur astronomers could help make discoveries like that reported Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters journal. In an analysis of 13 years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, astronomers detected an unexpected and unexplained signal outside of our galaxy. Astronomers were searching for a gamma-ray feature linked to the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest known light in the universe, dating to around 380,000 years after the big bang, when the first atoms were forming. Scientists previously found the CMB to be 0.12% hotter, with more microwaves than average toward the constellation Leo, and 0.12% colder, with fewer microwaves than average, in the opposite direction, per Space.com. This "dipole" pattern is thought to result from "the movement of our solar system relative to the CMB," reports ABC Australia.
If that's true, "similar dipoles caused by the movement of the solar system should arise in all light from astrophysical sources far beyond the solar system," per Space.com. Astronomers hoped to confirm this in gamma rays in the direction of the CMB's peak. Instead, they found a gamma-ray dipole "in the southern sky, far from the CMB's [peak], and its magnitude is 10 times greater than what we would expect from our motion," Chris Shrader, an astrophysicist at the Catholic University of America, tells the outlet. The dipole peaks in a location similar to that of the dipole observed in ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the most energetic particles in the universe, which have an unknown origin. The discovery suggests "unidentified sources are producing both phenomena," per Space.com. (More gamma rays stories.)
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