How to Use gamma-ray burst in a Sentence

gamma-ray burst

noun
  • The gamma-ray burst — witnessed as a long, bright pulse of light — was the birth cry of a black hole.
    Katie Hunt, CNN, 22 Oct. 2022
  • In a gamma-ray burst, however, the corpse stays active.
    Anna Y. Q. Ho, Scientific American, 26 Nov. 2020
  • In each instance, the gamma-ray burst does not come from the explosion itself.
    Jonathan O'Callaghan, Wired, 18 July 2021
  • The gamma-ray burst was slightly offset from the center of the black hole, so its light took two paths, one slightly longer than the other.
    Quanta Magazine, 29 Mar. 2021
  • However, the researchers knew the February flare was too bright to have been a gamma-ray burst.
    Jacquelyne Germain, Smithsonian Magazine, 2 Dec. 2022
  • Astronomers found a fireball from a gamma-ray burst in 2013, but there was no proof that neutron stars were involved.
    Dennis Overbye, New York Times, 16 Oct. 2017
  • Despite that, this gamma-ray burst poses no danger to us.
    Phil Plait, Scientific American, 21 Oct. 2022
  • The Hubble Space Telescope captured the infrared afterglow of the very bright gamma-ray burst.
    Briley Lewis, Popular Science, 4 Apr. 2023
  • Unfortunately, the chances of seeing a gamma-ray burst go off so close by aren’t very high.
    Erika K. Carlson, Discover Magazine, 14 Jan. 2020
  • Almost every day, without warning, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) wash over Earth from somewhere in the vast depths of the cosmos.
    Lee Billings, Scientific American, 20 Nov. 2019
  • Over the years, numerous astronomers have suggested the culprit might have been a gamma-ray burst (GRB).
    Eric Betz, Discover Magazine, 9 May 2021
  • Another option is that the long gamma-ray bursts don’t come from feasting newborn black holes at all.
    Quanta Magazine, 13 Dec. 2023
  • The link between this observation and the gamma-ray burst event wasn’t evident at first.
    Dhananjay Khadilkar, Ars Technica, 17 Nov. 2023
  • In just a few seconds, a gamma-ray burst blasts out the same amount of energy that the Sun will radiate throughout its entire life.
    Eleonora Troja, The Conversation, 21 Dec. 2022
  • But although lethal, nearby gamma-ray bursts are also very rare.
    Seth Shostak, Quartz, 26 Sep. 2019
  • The team concluded that an intermediate-mass black hole sat between us and the gamma-ray burst.
    Quanta Magazine, 29 Mar. 2021
  • Astronomers around the world then got to work, training other telescopes on the part of the sky the gamma-ray burst had come from and poring through data that had already been collected.
    The Economist, 16 Oct. 2017
  • Again, the rate at which this would occur is sufficiently low that very few planets would ever be sterilized by a gamma-ray burst.
    Discover Magazine, 17 July 2017
  • As researchers explain in a new paper published in the journal Science, the typical distance of a gamma-ray burst from Earth is around 20 billion light-years.
    Mike Wehner, BGR, 4 June 2021
  • Space telescopes observed a short gamma-ray burst, a powerful beam of radiation, coming from about the same part of the sky about two seconds later.
    Marina Koren, The Atlantic, 17 Oct. 2017
  • On average, there is thought to be one observable gamma-ray burst in the visible universe every day.
    Jonathan O'Callaghan, Wired, 18 July 2021
  • This latest gamma-ray burst falls into the long category.
    Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 17 Oct. 2022
  • The event, a gamma-ray burst, was triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, forming a single mass of neutrons that was large enough to collapse into a black hole shortly afterwards.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 5 Sep. 2018
  • In mid-August, these telescopes were all abruptly aimed toward the origin of a gamma-ray burst, an explosion predicted to come from the impact of two neutron stars.
    Author: Sarah Kaplan, Ben Guarino, Alaska Dispatch News, 28 Sep. 2017
  • The new results suggest that neutron-star mergers are important sources of short-duration gamma-ray bursts, study team members said.
    Mike Wall, Space.com, 5 Sep. 2018
  • At the time, scientists said the uniquely bright and energetic gamma-ray burst can will help them to learn more about elements formed and ejected during a massive star collapse.
    Ariana Garcia, Chron, 23 Dec. 2022
  • Meanwhile, your other instrument, a dozen detectors working in tandem, senses the whole sky (except for where Earth blocks the view) on the hunt for distant flashes called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).
    Liz Kruesi, National Geographic, 11 June 2019
  • Astronomers generally think that one type of gamma-ray burst, called long-duration gamma-ray bursts, come from very massive, fast-spinning stars.
    Erika K. Carlson, Discover Magazine, 14 Jan. 2020
  • Meanwhile, astronomers spied a bright gamma-ray burst that resulted from a rare cosmic explosion, releasing a shower of gold and platinum in space.
    Ashley Strickland, CNN, 10 Dec. 2022
  • The rumors hinted that in addition to the gravitational-wave signal, astronomers had observed a short gamma-ray burst and something that looked a lot like a kilonova.
    Sanjana Curtis, Scientific American, 12 Dec. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gamma-ray burst.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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