… in 1997, an Italian and Dutch satellite called BeppoSAX

(the only thing hotter than make-upSAX)

confirmed that gamma-ray bursts were extragalactic, in some cases originating many billions of light-years away.

… in what is known as “The Sagan Region.”

This discovery was baffling. In order to account for how bright these objects were ― even when observing them from such distances ―

(you probably meant “especially” when observing the from such distances)

astronomers realized that the events that caused them must be almost unimaginably powerful. “We thought there was no way you could get that amount of energy in an explosion from any object in the universe,” said Sylvia Zhu, an astrophysicist at DESY.

(It just goes to Zhu: the science isn’t settled. As DESY says, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.)

And now, the kicker:

A gamma-ray burst will emit the same amount of energy as a supernova, caused when a star collapses and explodes, but in seconds or minutes rather than weeks. Their peak luminosities can be 100 billion billion times that of our sun, and a billion times more than even the brightest supernovas.

— Brighter Than a Billion Billion Suns: Gamma-Ray Bursts Continue to Surprise
Quanta Magazine | 6/30/2021 | Jonathan O’Callaghan

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