Programme details

The 2002 Descartes Prize went to a research project that has helped to solve the mystery of gamma ray bursts in the universe, coordinated by Edward Van Den Heuvel and Luigi Piro.
The research project would not have been possible without international collaboration. Using "BeppoSAX” they zere able to locate and study gamma bursts in gamma rays and X rays, and thanks to a series of earthbound observatories important results were obtained.

The Team

This research brought together teams from the Astrophysics Institute and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the Ferrare Astrophysics Institute and the Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, English teams from Cambridge and Danish, Spanish, German and American teams.

Objective

The aim of the project was to discover the source and nature of the most violent explosions in the universe: gamma ray bursts.

Observation Technique

For gamma rays and hard x-rays radiation, you cannot create an optic, no lenses or mirrors, and the technique that was applied here in the BeppoSAX is the so-called pin-hole camera technique.
The equivalent of the camera obscura, a front side with the holes, a plate with the holes, and a back side that is the equivalent of the photographic plate that registers the x rays and the gamma rays.

Capturing Gamma Ray Bursts

"BeppoSAX" was launched on 30 April 1996 and on 28 February 1997, the researchers finally succeeded to capture these gamma ray bursts.
After the wide field camera identified the location of the event with a high degree of precision, the satellite was rotated in the direction of the gamma ray.
Eight hours after the burst, they discovered an X-ray source which had never been observed before, three days after the event, they saw that the source had declined.
This led the researchers to conclude that the source really was associated with the gamma burst.

Locating Gamma Ray Bursts

The locations given by the wide field camera were not only good enough for the BeppoSAX to search for an afterglow but also for optical telescopes.
This gave a very precise position, even better than the x rays, so the researchers were able to find out that the bursts were located in very remote Milky Way Systems.

Conclusion

The project discovered that the birthplaces of gamma ray bursts were located in Milky Way Systems at enormous distances between five and ten billion light years distance from us, and involved explosions in which the quantity of energy released is equivalent to that emitted by the sun over a thousand billion years. And this very probably, is linked to the explosion of black stars at the end of that life where the inner core of the star collapses into a black hole.