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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.
I think the conventional 0.01s to 1000s figures are how long they last in gamma rays. Do the bursts last longer in other forms of light?
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Also, does anyone know what the Wolf-Rayet star has to do with anything? Is it a possible burst candidate? I read the origional article and the gsfs.nasa.gov link and I didn't find any mention of this.
Does the "Wolf-Rayec" star classification refer to a massive star about to collapse?
All Astronomy Picture of the Day ( here) says about it is that Wolf-Rayec stars are around 40x the mass of the sun and provides a broken link
To confuse the issue more, Weisstein's World of Science ( here )says Wolf-Rayec stars are:
"A type of star whose spectra consist of very wide emission bands as well as absorption lines in the violet region. These lead astronomers to conclude that these stars are surrounded by rapidly expanding shells of gas. Wolf-Rayet stars are classified as irregular variable stars, and are sometimes also called W stars."
From this one might assume Wolf-Rayet stars might already have undergone an event which might have caused a GRB (gamma ray burst)?
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
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.