Antimatter may power more than just starships. It might also have helped rev up the BOAT – an exploding star nicknamed “the Brightest Of All Time.”

It was seen in October of 2022, in Sagitta, the arrow. Right now, the constellation is in the east at nightfall.

The event was a gamma-ray burst – a stellar explosion that aimed “jets” of gamma rays in our direction. It was by far the most powerful cosmic event ever seen. It produced more energy in one second than the Sun will generate in its entire lifetime of more than 10 billion years. It was so powerful, in fact, that it created minor disturbances in Earth’s upper atmosphere – even though it was more than two billion light-years away.

The outburst probably happened when a star many times the mass of the Sun died. Its core collapsed to form a black hole, while its outer layers blasted into space as a supernova. As the star died, superheated gas spiraled around the black hole. Magnetic fields directed some of that material into space from the star’s poles. Earth lined up along one of those beams, which is why we saw the outburst of gamma rays.

A recent study says that an odd feature recorded during the outburst might have been produced when electrons and their antimatter counterparts rammed together and destroyed each other. That would have added to the energy of the blast – helping make the gamma-ray burst the BOAT – the Brightest of All Time.

Script by Damond Benningfield