The brightest gamma-ray burst

GRB 221009A, the brightest burst ever recorded: how a dying star's jet, under two degrees wide, swept across Earth from two billion years away

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A star's core falls in

The story begins when the core of a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses in less than a second into a black hole, ringed by a spinning disc of hot gas.

No telescope saw the star. But the supernova that followed, found by the James Webb Space Telescope months later (Blanchard et al., 2024), shows that a massive star did die. Its core, disc and jets are drawn from computer models of such collapses; nothing here has been seen.

Objects in this story

• Cygnus X-1
• Crab Nebula
• Gaia BH1

More simulations

• S301: the fastest known star
• Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hits Jupiter
• The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs
• How a star is born
• Pulsar
• Earth's magnetic shield
• The Sun's death
• A star torn apart
• A massive star explodes
• Type Ia supernova
• How black holes are made
• Two black holes merge
• Two neutron stars collide
• Magnetar
• Quasar
• Gravitational lensing
• The Milky Way meets Andromeda
• The Big Bang

What if: ideas no one has observed

• What if the Sun became a black hole?
• False vacuum decay
• What if the Moon disappeared?
• Wormhole
• White hole
• Warp drive
• Dyson swarm
• Hawking evaporation
• Near light speed
• Falling into a black hole
• A black hole crosses the Solar System