Slashdot Mirror
Gamma Ray Burst
Cackmobile writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that some Australian scientists have been watching a gamma-ray burst. The article makes some good points about the origins of these." Update: 03/21 03:27 GMT by T :
MickDownUnder writes with a link to NASA's press-releasy version, with story, pictures and animations.
The article does not say much, except that a long observation of a gamma burst was made. In the conclusion it says: "Mr Price said astronomers were not sure what caused gamma-ray bursts."
Nasa is building a satellite capable of catching gamma-ray burst on the fly. Here's the link.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
From the article: "They could be the birth cry of black holes formed from the ruins of a supernova or the result of colliding black holes or neutron stars." Those are hardly new theories. The article doesn't say how the observers happened to catch the burst as it happened, what observers were able to see in the "weeks" (which is a long time for a gamma ray burst) that followed, or what the artist's conception of a Wolf-Rayet star has to do with any of this. On the whole, a very disappointing article. This story, published last October 8 by NASA is much more informative.
---Any philosophy that can be put "in a nutshell" belongs there.---
I thought that was Zaphod Beeblebrox?
This is my World Wide Web of Whatever
The gamma rays themselves persist anywhere from .01 to 1000 s. Even with HETE-2, we have almost no chance of pinpointing the location of the short GRBs. But the long ones last long enough to pinpoint their location with X-ray telescopes. If that happens, then the GRB can be observed across the energy spectrum from X-rays to radio waves. They often take weeks before they dim to the point they can't be distinguished from their host galaxies. The misperception that gamma rays bursts are fleeting comes from the days before the BeppoSAX satellite launch in 1996, when positions could not be located precisely enough for follow up observations in other regions of the spectrum.
Long GRBs (such as the one lst October) are probably caused by hypernovae or collapsars, where a massive star (at least 20x our sun's mass, not the 10-15 solar mass star mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald) has its core collapse into a black hole, perhaps after collapsing into an intermediate neutron star. The short GRBs are probably the result of mergers between massive compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Run for your lives! There are scattered reports of the scientists turning into gigantic, green, muscle-bound monsters after beein exposed to the Gamma Ray Burst. Run! Hide! Flee!
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
What better way to get the attention of another sentient species than by creating massive gamma ray bursts that could be seen the all over the universe!
Maybe SETI needs to take a closer look at these bursts?
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
You wouldnt like them when theyre angry.
Science Daily has an article about it too, saying "Scientists arriving on the scene of a gamma-ray burst just moments after the explosion, have witnessed the death of a gigantic star and the birth of something monstrous in its place, quite possibly a brand new, spinning black hole."
This is exciting, seems like we have a first hand look at the formation of a black hole!
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't