The Shortest Gamma-Ray Burst Ever Detected | GRB 200826A

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:01]NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has spotted the shortest burst of gamma rays ever seen from a collapsing star.

[00:00:09]It challenges the traditional classification of gamma ray bursts, also called GRBs.

[00:00:15]Short GRBs, those lasting less than 2 seconds, are thought to occur when orbiting objects like neutron stars spiral together and merge.

[00:00:25]Longer bursts [music] come from massive stars at the ends of their lives. A black hole forms at the center of the collapsing star. It drives long-lasting jets that drill through the star, producing gamma rays when they emerge.

[00:00:39]The star then transforms into a supernova.

[00:00:43]On August 26th, 2020, Fermi detected a GRB lasting about 1 second.

[00:00:50]Instruments [music] on other spacecraft saw it, too, including NASA's Wind and Mars Odyssey missions.

[00:00:56]They helped narrow down the location to a patch of sky in the constellation Andromeda.

[00:01:02]Less than a day after the GRB, astronomers identified a fading source of visible light using the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory.

[00:01:11]This was the burst's afterglow.

[00:01:14]NASA's Swift satellite soon recorded X-rays from it, [music] and within days ground-based radio telescopes observed it, too.

[00:01:22]After a few weeks, when the afterglow had decayed, ground-based observatories confirmed [music] the presence of a brightening supernova.

[00:01:30]This means the GRB must have come from a massive collapsing [music] star, not a merger.

[00:01:36]Astronomers think this burst, called GRB 200826A, [music] was on the verge of not occurring at all. About 6.6 [music] billion years ago, a massive star in a distant galaxy reached the end of its life.

[00:01:50]>> [music] >> Its core collapsed and formed a black hole, which launched near light-speed particle jets through the star, but just as [music] they breach the surface, the jets shut down, producing a surprisingly brief GRB.

[00:02:05]Astronomers think it's likely some short GRBs they've detected [music] are misclassified as mergers when instead they're really bursts from jets that nearly failed to drill through collapsing stars. [music] We only detect GRBs when the jets aim in our direction.

[00:02:21]>> [music] >> Even accounting for this, long GRBs still occur at a lower rate than the supernova type associated with them.

[00:02:29]This means most collapsing massive stars [music] likely fail to produce long-lived jets.

[00:02:35]Dying, at least from the gamma-ray perspective, with a whimper instead of a bang.

[00:02:43]>> [bell]