A detailed analysis of data from Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) and Swift’s BAT provides strong evidence that the April 15 event was unlike any burst associated with mergers, noted Oliver Roberts, an associate scientist at Universities Space Research Association’s Science and Technology Institute in Huntsville, Alabama, who led the study. Aranguren ME, Breis JTF, Antezana E, Mungall C, Gonzalez AR, Wilkinson M. OPPL-Galaxy, a Galaxy tool for enhancing ontology exploitation as part of bioinformatics workflows. J Biomed Semantics. 2013;4(1):2. Compare these initial contigs to the NCBI non-redundant protein sequence database (NCBI NR) using BLASTX, requesting at most one hit and tabular output including the taxonomy fields (and optionally the hit description).

Roberts and his colleagues say the data show some evidence of seismic vibrations during the eruption. The highest-energy X-rays recorded by Fermi’s GBM reached 3 million electron volts (MeV), or about a million times the energy of blue light, itself a record for giant flares. The researchers say this emission arose from a cloud of ejected electrons and positrons moving at about 99% the speed of light. The short duration of the emission and its changing brightness and energy reflect the magnetar’s rotation, ramping up and down like the headlights of a car making a turn. Roberts describes it as starting off as an opaque blob – he pictures it as resembling a photon torpedo from the “Star Trek” franchise – that expands and diffuses as it travels. Plant pests and pathogens introduce effector proteins into the host plant cell (green), where they can target and manipulate plant biochemistry to the benefit of the pathogen ( Dodds & Rathjen, 2010). Effectors may be delivered by haustorial ingression from a fungus or oomycete such as P. infestans (orange), via the bacterial Type III secretion system mechanism (blue), by nematodes via injection into the plant cell though a needle-like stylet (red), or many other processes (not illustrated). Where effectors may be identified by sequence properties, candidate effector proteins can be computationally predicted using Galaxy.Magnetars are neutron stars with the strongest-known magnetic fields, with up to a thousand times the intensity of typical neutron stars and up to 10 trillion times the strength of a refrigerator magnet. Modest disturbances to the magnetic field can cause magnetars to erupt with sporadic X-ray bursts for weeks or longer. Complex tools with a large number of options present a particular challenge to wrapper design, when attempting to balance the desire to offer full control and flexibility against usability. In the case of the NCBI BLAST+ tools, we chose initially to omit some of the less commonly-used options, and to provide others in an ‘advanced options’ section. Similarly, the wrapper for the MIRA assembler ( Chevreux, Wetter & Suhai, 1999) currently exposes only the most common arguments as user-configurable parameters. A classic short gamma-ray burst begins with two orbiting neutron stars, the crushed remnants of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. As the stars circle ever closer, they strip neutron-rich material from each other. They also generate gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time – although none were detected from this event. Papers analyzing different aspects of the event and its implications were published on Jan. 13 in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy. The amount of energy required to create the cavity in Ophiuchus is about five times greater than the previous record holder, an event in a galaxy cluster called MS 0735.6+7421, and hundreds and thousands of times greater than typical clusters.

Observing this fluctuating tail is conclusive evidence of a giant flare. Seen from millions of light-years away, though, this emission is too dim to detect with today’s instruments. Because these signatures are missing, giant flares in our galactic neighborhood may be masquerading as much more distant and powerful merger-type GRBs. GRBs, the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, can be detected across billions of light-years. Those lasting less than about two seconds, called short GRBs, occur when a pair of orbiting neutron stars – both the crushed remnants of exploded stars – spiral into each other and merge. Astronomers confirmed this scenario for at least some short GRBs in 2017, when a burst followed the arrival of gravitational waves – ripples in space-time – produced when neutron stars merged 130 million light-years away.

This may be a black hole slurping up a cloud of gas and dust

Galaxy Tool Shed Repository “Filter sequences by ID”: https://toolshed.g2.bx.psu.edu/view/peterjc/seq_filter_by_id/ Future work will include additional wrappers for the remaining or new BLAST+ command line tools, exposing additional command line options via the Galaxy interface, and additional output file formats. Developments within Galaxy will also allow new functionality. For example, we hope to build on the Galaxy Visual Analysis Framework [ 40] to offer graphical representation of BLAST results within Galaxy, such as that offered by the NCBI web service. Similarly, managing local BLAST databases could be facilitated using the Data Manager Framework [ 35]. The difference between your typical gamma-ray burst and this one is about the same as the difference between the light bulb in your living room and the lit-up floodlights in a sports stadium,” says Andrew Levan, Radbound University, the Netherlands, who used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe the burst.