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A recent gamma-ray burst known as the boat, brightest of all time, appears to have produced a high-energy

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On Sunday, October 9, 2022, Judy Rackison was 35,000 feet in the air, in route to a high-energy astrophysics conference when the biggest cosmic explosion in history took place.

I was on a 15-hour flight to South Africa at the time.

I landed and I looked at my email and I looked at

my phone and I had dozens of messages from colleagues who weren't traveling there saying we had

this interesting burst and, you know, it's really exceptional and, you know, what are we doing? And

there was certainly a buzz at this conference. The explosion was a long gamma ray burst, a cosmic event where a massive dying star

unleashes powerful jets of energy as it collapses into a black hole or neutron star.

Here's Sylvia Zhu, an astrophysicist at the German electron synchrotron, just out of Berlin,

talking about this GRB, short for gamma-ray

burst.

It was actually a bit of a confusing thing at first.

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