Revising distance by 20 orders of magnitude: the most distant gamma-ray burst or a satellite?

Speaker: Dr hab. Michał Michałowski
Affiliation: Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poznań, Poland
Link to MSTeams meeting

Recently there was a discovery of the most distant gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recordedin a galaxy at redshift 11, which means that we see it as it was only 400 million years after the Big Bang. The existence of such a distant GRB would have important consequences on our understanding of the conditions in which the first stars in the Universe formed and of the formation of the first galaxies. I will show that this signal was in fact Solar emission reflected off a space debris, the Breeze-M upper stage of a Russian Proton rocket. Unfortunately, such misidentifications will happen more often given that the number of satellites and space debris increases.

Seminar language: English
Chairman: Prof. Sławomir Breiter

Google Calendar

iCal Export