Gamma-Ray Burst Hints at Neutron Star Merger

[zavvy]

<b>Gamma-Ray Burst Hints at Neutron Star Merger</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />Astronomers are furiously searching for the source of a brief burst of gamma rays detected by NASA's Swift space telescope on Monday. The source could reveal the mechanism for the short bursts, which have confounded astronomers for years.<br /><br />Gamma-ray bursts - volleys of very high-energy photons that can originate from any direction in the sky - come in two classes. Observations suggest "long" bursts, which can last from seconds to a few minutes, are born when massive stars explode and their cores collapse into black holes.<br /><br />But little information exists about "short" bursts, lasting less than a second. These are so fleeting astronomers have not been able to point telescopes toward them fast enough to pinpoint their locations or study them in any detail. “They may not come from the same source as long bursts," says Dale Frail, a Swift team member at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, US. <br /><br />Swift can swivel towards gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in less than a minute and has detected two short bursts since its launch in November 2004. The first occurred in the daytime sky, making follow-up observations difficult, but the second occurred in the night-time sky, raging for just one-tenth of a second just after midnight EDT.<br /><br />Swift took 53 seconds to spin towards the burst, called GRB 050509b, and took a further 62 seconds to get into the correct mode before capturing an extremely faint X-ray afterglow that faded completely after a further 200 seconds. But it used that signal to home in on the burst's general location and sent the information to astronomers on the ground.<br /><br />Immediately, researchers aimed some of the world's most powerful telescopes - including the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii - at the region. They found four smudges of light - possibly

 

[jurgens]

nothing was found though, so no they couldn't detect any afterglow in the visible. In fact the region of space that they detected the gamma ray bursts remains almost completely unchanged compared to an image taken before the gamma ray burst was detected.

 

[jurgens]

If you want some more info on it, check this out<br /><br />http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys301/lectures/grb/grb.html<br /><br />That was from my astronomy lecture that I had yesterday, the video of the two nuetron stars colliding is slick =)