Gamma Ray Bursts are Nascent Black Holes

tjgoodwin writes "A paper (PDF format) published in Nature shows, for the first time, that Gamma Ray Bursts are the result of a massive (> 10 solar masses) star collapsing to form a black hole. PPARC has a press release which includes a notable picture of a T. Rex glancing nervously over its shoulder at a supernova!"

Comments

T-rex

[Violet Null]

"...which includes a notable picture of a T. Rex glancing nervously over its shoulder at a supernova!"

My parents tell me about the days before they had time-travel journalism, but I have to say, I don't believe it.

Well

[TheGreenLantern]

I'm sure Reed Richards and the rest of the Fantastic Four will be happy to hear this. Perhaps they can now develop shielding for the X-10 rocket ship that will finally be able to block those nasty Gamma Rays.

Oh wait, those were cosmic rays. And come to think of it, why they hell would you want to block them? Hell, who doesn't want cool super powers? Trust me kids, it's a blast.

Re:Well

[TheGreenLantern]

You got something against green?

Seems the dot-com collapse is a bit widespread..

[billn]

The pattern of gamma ray bursts uses the same dispersion model of fleeing CEO's from massive (>10 billion shares) companies collapsing to form investor black holes.

Gravastars?

[pubudu]

I saw a special on PBS a while back that came to basically the same conclusion, that only a hypernova could produce enough energy for us to notice them at that distance. Is this paper simply more experimental verification?

Of course, my real question is whether the purported alternative to black holes, viz. gravastars (Gravitational Condensate Stars; described here, with an associated /. story here), would do the same thing. It's my understanding that a gravastar would appear (almost?) identical to a black hole from the outside, and so ought to be able to produce this kind of phenomenon, but is it so? Would a star collapsing into a gravastar produce a gamma-ray burst? (I assume that, since they are different from black holes, the details of their formation would be different, as well--perhaps different enough to upset the whole thing.)

Re:Big discovery!

[drudd]

Interestingly I just went to a colloquia on this very topic today...

While the current theories do involve accretion onto a black hole, the accretion rates necessary to power a GRB are very high (0.1 solar masses per second!). Several possible ways to get these kind of rates are with mergers of a black hole and a neutron star or white dwarf, or by having a red giant engulf its binary white dwarf, short circuiting the supernova track.

Now to answer your question: these black holes are formed from stars. The average mass of these objects are on the order of a few solar masses, and are also very rare (something like 1 every 10 million years in our galaxy). In short, black holes formed in this way are not even close to being significant contributors to dark matter.

Doug

Re:Ripped off in Australia last night?

[pubudu]

Sounds very much like the program [abc.net.au] I caught on (Australian) ABC TV last night, which made every effort to look like a very current local production. They definitely made use of some of the same simulations that are shown on the PPARC press release linked from the story.

I don't think it was the same program. The PBS program was produced by Nova; it was entitled Death Star. A transcript is here. I suspect that everyone uses the simulations provided by the researchers, rather than create their own from scratch without understanding the physics.