This is an illustration of MAGIC telescopes capturing images of very intense gamma rays. “MAGIC” refers to the twin Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescopes in the Canary Islands. The burst was, at the time, a most intense energy source in the visible universe. Gamma rays themselves are invisible, but these were so intense, they left an afterglow of visible light – a flash that astronomers measured at between 0.2 and 1 teraelectron volts, equal to the energy released by Earth’s most massive particle collider, the LHC.
The image came from the ICRAR multimedia archive, credited to Superbossa.com and C. Righi.