Gama-ray burst discriminated

[Erich]

I had to make up for my last stupid posting, so here , I hope this will be of interest:

 

It takes two (October 2005) - News - PhysicsWeb http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/10/3

 

Now maybe they will figure out the base event at the heart of these explosions.

 

Erich

[Martin]

I had to make up for my last stupid posting' date=' so here , I hope this will be of interest:

 

It takes two (October 2005) - News - PhysicsWeb http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/10/3

 

Now maybe they will figure out the base event at the heart of these explosions.

 

Erich[/quote']

 

Great find Erich, thanks!

 

your "Physicsweb" page provided this link to the online preprint of a Nature article

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0510110 (free download of full PDF here)

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7060/abs/nature04142.html (only abstract available here, from 6 October issue of Nature)

 

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this is very timely

the journal article preprint was posted 5 October and will appear in the current issue of Nature (6 October)

 

it look more and more likely that the short-hard GRBs come from two very dense objects spiraling in and coallescing---like they say in Erich's physicsweb article. That is, two neutronstars or blackhole and neutron star----some such binary pair.

[Martin]

this type of burst the very brief GRB has a special importance

 

some versions of special relativity (sometimes called DSR) predict that very high energy Gammaray light should travel just slightly faster than light of ordinary energy

 

but the predicted speed difference is so slight that one cannot detect it until the light has been traveling for a billion or more years.

 

so you are talking about a burst that only lasts for a few milliseconds and has been traveling for a couple of billion years.

 

If DSR is right then IN THAT KIND OF BURST ONE MIGHT SEE TWO PEAKS.

 

Two peaks just a few milliseconds apart.

 

===============

by 2007 or 2008 it is expected that one will be able to record the gammaray flux and plot it against time so accurately that one will be able to detect a DSR effect, if it exists. If it does not then this will shoot down the DSR hypothesis and that will have a significant effect on the direction taken in quantum gravity research.

 

here is a paper by Lee Smolin about that:

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0501091

 

so it is precisely these very brief GRBs that some people will be looking for and recording, partly to settle this. (and also to settle issues about what it is that produces the GRBs, as you mentioned in your post)

[us.2u]

http://www.hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q598.html...... Hopefully this might be of interest Martin