Robotic Telescope Unravels Cosmic Blast Mystery

An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that scientists from Liverpool John Moores University have used their robotic telescope in the Canary Islands to measure the polarization of light from a Gamma Ray Burst just 203 seconds after its detection by NASA's Swift Gamma Ray Observatory Satellite. The result suggests that the emitting material flowing out from the explosion may not be highly magnetized in the way that some theories had predicted."

Comments

When Anomalous Becomes the Norm

[pln2bz]

It shouldn't surprise us that GRB's don't behave as we thought. Nearly everything we think we know about them is based upon assumptions and speculation that are only minimally supported by evidence. There is potential for error at every single step of this process. To continue to be surprised that our telescopes are returning anomalous data when that's what's been happening nearly every single day for years and years and years is silly. At some point, you have to go back to your assumptions and figure out where you went wrong.

Too long of a time delay?

[cyberbob2351]

With explosions that size, wouldn't 203 seconds of lagtime before observation be a huge killer of the results?

Furthermore, is there any possibility of a dipole radiation distribution for the fraction of linear polarization? Perhaps for this particular sample, we caught the glimpse of a stellar pole? Wouldn't we need a larger sample size to make a more conclusive prediction if this was the case?