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Title    Short Gamma-Ray Bursts Do Follow Binary Neutron Star Mergers
Date    Sunday June 17 2018, @01:13PM
Author    janrinok
Topic   
from the gotcha dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/06/16/1413223

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at Oregon State University have confirmed that last fall's union of two neutron stars did in fact cause a short gamma-ray burst. The findings, published today [14 June] in Physical Review Letters, represent a key step forward in astrophysicists' understanding of the relationship between binary neutron star mergers, gravitational waves and short gamma-ray bursts.

Commonly abbreviated as GRBs, gamma-ray bursts are narrow beams of electromagnetic waves of the shortest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. GRBs are the universe's most powerful electromagnetic events, occurring billions of light years from Earth and able to release as much energy in a few seconds as the sun will in its lifetime. GRBs fall into two categories, long duration and short duration. Long GRBs are associated with the death of a massive star as its core becomes a black hole and can last from a couple of seconds to several minutes.

Short GRBs had been suspected to originate from the merger of two neutron stars, which also results in a new black hole -- a place where the pull of gravity from super-dense matter is so strong that not even light can escape. Up to 2 seconds is the time frame of a short GRB.

The term neutron star refers to the gravitationally collapsed core of a large star; neutron stars are the smallest, densest stars known. According to NASA, neutron stars' matter is packed so tightly that a sugar-cube-sized amount of it weighs in excess of a billion tons.

In November 2017, scientists from U.S. and European collaborations announced they had detected an X-ray/gamma-ray flash that coincided with a blast of gravitational waves, followed by visible light from a new cosmic explosion called a kilonova. Gravitational waves, a ripple in the fabric of time-space, were first detected in September 2015, a red-letter event in physics and astronomy that confirmed one of the main predictions of Albert Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity.

"A simultaneous detection of gamma rays and gravitational waves from the same place in the sky was a major milestone in our understanding of the universe," said Davide Lazzati, a theoretical astrophysicist in the OSU College of Science. "The gamma rays allowed for a precise localization of where the gravitational waves were coming from, and the combined information from gravitational and electromagnetic radiation allows scientists to probe the binary neutron star system that's responsible in unprecedented ways."

Prior to Lazzati's latest research, however, it had been an open question as to whether the detected electromagnetic waves were "a short gamma-ray burst, or just a short burst of gamma rays" -- the latter being a different, weaker phenomenon.


Original Submission

Links

  1. "Arthur T Knackerbracket" - https://soylentnews.org/~Arthur+T+Knackerbracket
  2. "following story" - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180614015128.htm
  3. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=27311

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