gamma-ray burst

noun

gam·​ma-ray burst ˈga-mə-ˈrā- 

variants or less commonly gamma ray burst

plural gamma-ray bursts also gamma ray bursts

: a brief, powerful jet of gamma rays detected deep in space that is generated by the collapse and explosion of a celestial object

… researchers … have discovered a gamma-ray burst (GRB) approximately 2.4 billion light-years away in the constellation Sagitta that ranks as the brightest ever observed.

—Space Daily

Eventually, though, the neutron star slows down, probably because of magnetic braking. Then it implodes, touching off a gamma ray burst.

—Govert Schilling

—abbreviation GRB

Examples of gamma-ray burst in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Those gamma-ray bursts lasting less than two seconds (about 30 percent) are deemed short bursts, usually emitting from regions with very little star formation. —Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 26 July 2024

That hypothesis was confirmed in 2017 when the LIGO collaboration picked up the gravitational wave signal of two neutron stars merging, accompanied by the powerful gamma-ray bursts associated with a kilonova. —Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 26 July 2024

Up in the turret, Phaedra slips off her hood and stares at her before unleashing the kind of gamma-ray burst usually unheard of outside of collapsing stars and the most contentious of middle-school sleepovers. —Molly Fitzpatrick, Vulture, 19 Jan. 2024

The situation resembles an earlier mystery surrounding another class of cosmic explosions: gamma-ray bursts, which were shown in the 1990s to arise from three separate types of events. —Adam Mann, Scientific American, 22 Nov. 2021

Word History

First Known Use

1973, in the meaning defined above