Thursday, July 2, 2009

Awesome Image of Gamma-Ray Burst



I am not very good with space matters and hence i am in no position to add anything to the story i found on Wired so thought to share the original story with our readers.  Since i like the picture very much so i couldn’t stop myself from making it available on TN.

“Gamma-ray bursts are the most massive explosions in the universe since the Big Bang, and yet scientists still know relatively little about them. In particular, dark bursts, such as the one in the center of the image above, remain very mysterious.

This dark burst was first detected by NASA’s Swift satellite and then imaged by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The image shows previously unknown galaxies that contain strangely dense clouds of dust that dampen the burst’s visible light, but not the high-energy gamma rays or X-rays.

Gamm-ray bursts are so powerful that they release more energy than stars like the sun will emit during their entire life spans. No true bursts have been detected in the Milky Way, most are billions of light years away from Earth.

New research published last week on the arXiv website, and not yet peer reviewed, suggests that gamma-ray bursts may be the result of a strange effect that can stop a black hole from forming.

The current thinking is any star more than three times the size of the sun will eventually collapse into a black hole. But Ilya Rozen of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow thinks a phase change of matter into a very different form creates a vaccuum in an imploding star that results in a burning wall that he predicts would emit powerful gamma-ray bursts.




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