The observation was made at 8 a.m. following the alert was given jointly by NASA’s FERMI space telescope and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) INTEGRAL Satellite, both dedicated to detecting Gamma Bursts, specifies the Observatory of Oukaimeden in a press release, indicating that the source bears the name of GRB220514A.
“There was an explosion on May 14, which gave rise to this signal. Eight hours following receiving the alert, we pointed the OUkaimden MOSS telescope towards the position indicated by two telescopes, NASA’s FERMI and ESA’s INTEGRAL, and indeed we detected this signal and we published this result in a circular dedicated to this type of event”, explained Pr Zouhair Benkhaldoun, teacher-researcher at the Semlalia Faculty of Sciences in Marrakech (FSSM) under the Cadi Ayyad University (UCA) and director of the university observatory Cadi Ayyad, in a statement to the press, adding that the Oukaimeden Observatory telescope is the only telescope in this part of the globe that has detected this phenomenon.
Gamma-ray bursts remain to this day a mystery and a hot topic of research in what is now known as “multimessenger astronomy.”
A network called GRANDMA and bringing together several observatories around the globe has been set up to monitor this phenomenon, which is highly prized by researchers.
These bursts, when they are located at a distant distance, can have as their source “processes involving neutron stars, black holes or hypernovae, or even astrophysical phenomena unknown to date”.
The Oukaimeden Observatory, under the Semlalia Faculty of Sciences of Cadi Ayyad University, joined the GRANDMA network a few months ago and started observations very recently (April 2022) with the following telescopes all operated on the Oukaimeden site: the MOSS Telescope, the OWL Telescope of the South Korean Space Agency and the telescopes of the Moroccan Astrophotography Association.
This last association has just built an observatory called HAO (High Atlas Observatory) at the Oukaimeden observatory and co-signed the circular that was published following this discovery.
Beyond the great first that the Oukaimeden Observatory has just made with this discovery, the Gamma Burst monitoring program has once once more concretized the cooperation between professionals and Amateurs in Morocco known by the acronym ProAm in the field. science of the sky.
