The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded recently lit up a distant galaxy — and astronomers have nicknamed it the BOAT, for Brightest of All Time.
“We use the boat emoji a lot when we’re talking about it” on the messaging app Slack, says astronomer Jillian Rastinejad of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
Gamma-ray bursts are energetic explosions that go off when a massive star dies and leaves behind a black hole or neutron star (SN: 11/20/19; SN: 8/2/21). The collapse sets off jets of gamma rays zipping away from the poles of the former star. If those jets happen to be pointed right at Earth, astronomers can see them
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