Learn about gamma rays and gamma flashes

What is Gamma rays and Gamma flashes? What do they mean to life? Let's learn about Gamma rays and Gamma flashes through the following article.

What is Gamma rays?

Gamma rays (denoted by γ) are a kind of extremely high frequency electromagnetic or photonic radiation. Gamma rays have the lowest wavelength (E-14m ÷ E-12m) and the highest frequency (E20 - E24 Hz) among electromagnetic waves so it carries more energy than radio waves, microwaves, and light waves. bright, infrared, ultraviolet and X-rays.

Discover gamma rays

Gamma rays were first observed in 1900 by French chemist Paul Villard when he was studying radiation emitted from radium, according to NASA data. A few years later, New Zealand-based chemist and physicist Ernest Rutherford proposed the name 'gamma rays', in order of alpha and beta rays - the name given to other particles that were observed from the picture. Nuclear radiation - and the name gamma rays from there.

Picture 1 of Learn about gamma rays and gamma flashes
The shot was taken across the sky, built from two observable years of NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, showing what the sky looked like in gamma ray light.(Photo: NASA / DOE / Fermi LAT Collaboration).

The origin of gamma rays

On Earth, gamma rays are usually produced by gamma decay from natural radioisotopes and secondary radiation from interactions with particles in cosmic rays. There are also other natural sources that do not have nuclear origins, such as lightning.

Outside the universe there are many processes that can produce gamma rays, and at the same time very high energy electrons are created. Since then they in turn cause secondary gamma rays by the mechanism of braking radiation, reverse compton and electron radiation. Most cosmic gamma rays are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere and can only be detected by space research stations or spacecraft.

Application of gamma rays

Gamma rays used in surgery, treatment of diseases related to tumors, vascular malformations, functional diseases of the brain. Gamma rays will help physicians accurately position lesions so that treatment is highly effective. An operation performed by this method in Vietnam costs only 1/6 or 1/8 compared to other countries in the region.

What is gamma flash?

Picture 2 of Learn about gamma rays and gamma flashes
Gamma Lightning is the strongest explosion in the universe, just after Big Bang.

Gamma flash (abbreviated: GRB from the Gamma ray burst English name) is the emission of abnormal gamma radiation in the sky so far its origin has not been determined, no measures to predict the position and time Gamma flash appears.

Gamma Lightning is the strongest explosion in the universe, just after Big Bang. Within a second, this lightning bolt unleashes a terrible energy, equivalent to solar energy throughout its 10 billion years of life. People have not explained why Gamma flashes .

Scientists only know one thing for sure that these explosions occur in very far regions in the universe, and Gamma lightning gives us light from the past.

Thanks to the intense intensity, Gamma flash can go through billions of light years. Also, scientists consider lightning Gamma to be the messenger of the early universe, when the first stars formed.