Saturday - September 13, 2008

Still No Steamboat

Steamboat McGoo, BMEWS member and host of the delightfully twisted blog Aardvarks & Asshats is still on hiatus. He moved to a place so far out in the country that they haven’t even invented electricity yet. Then he had to build a house to live in, and since the property is really rural, he even had a hard time finding illegal aliens to do the work! So things are going slowly. So this is sorta-Steamboat-ish, just because I miss him.

Six months ago, satellite telescopes spotted an exceptionally bright burst of energy that would have been the most distant object in the universe ever visible to the naked eye, if anyone had noticed it. Even though no humans have reported seeing it directly, the gamma-ray burst, an explosion that signals the violent death of a massive star, is changing theories of how these events look.

The light it emitted in the visible part of the spectrum was so intense that the burst would have been visible to the naked eye in the constellation Bootes for about 40 seconds.  No other gamma-ray burst has ever been visible without a telescope. The incredible amount of energy given off across the entire electromagnetic spectrum during a gamma-ray burst is what Jonathan Grindlay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls “the birth pangs of a black hole. This is the scream.”

Speaking of screaming black holes, here’s noted astrophysicist, brain surgeon, political authority, champion fly caster, bad plastic surgery victim, and all-around Expert Canadian Pamela “let’s get married” Anderson weighing in on Sarah Palin. Not because of Palin’s policies, beliefs, or actions as mayor, governor, or even VP candidate, but because Sarah likes a good mooseburger now and again like the rest of us.

It took the light of GRB 080319B about 7.4 billion years to reach Earth, placing the explosion “more than halfway back to the Big Bang and the origin of our universe,” Grindlay wrote in an editorial accompanying a new study of the burst in the Sept. 10 issue of the journal Nature. This means that the explosion happened 3 billion years before the sun or Earth even formed, Grindlay added.
...
Gamma-ray bursts are something of an extreme form of supernovas, the bright explosions that mark the deaths of massive stars.  But possibly one in every 1,000 supernovae is not one of these “normal” explosions. Instead of the star simply dying, its core collapses to form a black hole — which generates a gamma-ray burst.
...
“It was unexpected that it was this bright,” said lead author of the new study Judith Racusin

This burst, dubbed GRB 080319B, was first detected by the Swift satellite on March 19, while the spacecraft was serendipitously looking at another gamma-ray burst in the same area of the sky.
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The gamma-ray burst is actually a powerful jet of material sent out by the spinning accretion disk that surrounds a newborn black hole.  This bright part of the burst typically only lasts between 3 and 100 seconds, and an afterglow follows that can last for days or weeks.
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Swift may not still be around in 10 years, but the recently launched GLAST satellite (recently renamed Fermi) and other missions in the planning stages could catch a glimpse of them. But whether or not they do, Racusin knows one thing: With GRB 080319B, “we got lucky.”

Posted by Drew458     on 09/13/2008 at 11:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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