The detections occurred at 14:21 BST \/ 15:21 CEST on 9 October 2022.<\/p>\n
Disturbances like this can be caused by high energy activity from the Sun, but this time the source was an exploding star.<\/p>\n
Astronomers say analysing the effects of the gamma ray blast could reveal information about mass extinction events throughout Earth’s history.<\/p>\n
![\"Gamma-ray](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Gamma-ray-burst-221009A.jpg\")
Gamma-ray burst 221009A hit Earth’s atmosphere. Image captured by the XMM-Newton mission. Credit: ESA\/XMM-Newton\/M. Rigoselli (INAF)
\nStrongest gamma-ray burst ever measured<\/p>\n
Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be caused by exploding stars – supernovae<\/a> – or the collision of neutron stars<\/a>.<\/p>\n The International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) was launched in 2002 with the aim of detecting gamma-ray bursts.<\/p>\n The burst that hit Earth is known as GRB 221009A.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was probably the brightest gamma-ray burst we have ever detected,\u201d says Mirko Piersanti, University of L\u2019Aquila, Italy, and lead author of the team behind the study.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been measuring gamma-ray bursts since the 1960s, and this is the strongest ever measured,\u201d says co-author Pietro Ubertini, National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome, Italy, and the principal investigator for Intergral\u2019s IBIS instrument.<\/p>\n Statistically, a gamma-ray burst as strong as GRB 221009A hits Earth only once every 10,000 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n The gamma rays impacted Earth over a period of 800 seconds, delivering enough energy to be detected by lighting detectors in India.<\/p>\n Meanwhile in Germany, instruments recorded that Earth’s ionosphere was affected for several hours.<\/p>\n The ionosphere is a layer of Earth\u2019s upper atmosphere stretching from about 50-950km in altitude that contains electrically charged gases called plasma.<\/p>\n The ionosphere is so tenuous, spacecraft are able to hold orbits in most of the ionosphere.<\/p>\n One such spacecraft is the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES), which was launched in 2018 and monitors the top of the ionosphere.<\/p>\n The CSES looks for possible links between changes in Earth’s ionosphere and seismic events like earthquakes.<\/p>\n It can also study the impact of solar activity on Earth’s ionosphere.<\/p>\n Mirko and Pietro are part of the science team for CSES. They deduced that any disturbance created by the gamma-ray burst should have been detected by CSES.<\/p>\n “We had looked for this effect from other GRBs in the past but had seen nothing,” says Pietro.\u00a0<\/p>\n But this time, they were able to detect a strong signal from the burst, including a strong electric field variation in the top-side ionosphere.<\/p>\n That’s even though the gamma-ray burst happened 2 billion years ago, 2 billion lightyears away.<\/p>\n “Notably, this disturbance impacted the very lowest layers of Earth’s ionosphere, situated just tens of kilometres above our planet’s surface, leaving an imprint\u202fcomparable\u202fto that\u202fof a major solar flare,” says Laura Hayes, research fellows and solar physicist at ESA.<\/p>\n In a worst-case scenario, the science team say a strong gamma-ray burst could damage the ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet radiation from the Sun to reach Earth’s surface.<\/p>\n This may have been the cause of mass extinction events in Earth’s history.<\/p>\n Now the team are going back to look at older CSES data and correlate it with other gamma-ray bursts seen by Integral.<\/p>\n And a follow-up mission has been planned to further study the effects of gamma-ray bursts on Earth.<\/p>\n The paper ‘First Evidence of Earth\u2019s top-side ionospheric electric field variation triggered by impulsive cosmic photons’ by Piersanti et al. is published in Nature Communications. DOI 10.1038\/s41467-023-42551-5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earth was hit by a huge burst of gamma rays originating from a star nearly 2 billion lightyears…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,82],"class_list":["post-629608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Artist's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Integral.jpg\")
Artist’s impression of Integral, ESA’s International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory. Credit: ESA\/D. Ducros
\nWhat happened?<\/p>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Merging-neutron-stars-MAIN-b8ec75f.jpg\")
An artist\u2019s impression of two neutron stars merging and exploding as a kilonova. These rare events are expected to produce both gravitational waves and a short gamma-ray burst.
Credit: ESO\/L. Cal\u00e7ada\/M. Kornmesser<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/how-sun-affects-life-earth.jpg\")
A solar flare erupting from the Sun. Credit: NASA<\/p>\n