Robotic Telescope Unravels Cosmic Blast Mystery 58
An anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that scientists from Liverpool John Moores University have used their robotic telescope in the Canary Islands to measure the polarization of light from a Gamma Ray Burst just 203 seconds after its detection by NASA's Swift Gamma Ray Observatory Satellite. The result suggests that the emitting material flowing out from the explosion may not be highly magnetized in the way that some theories had predicted."
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Pick whichever seems appropriate.
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But, The effects it could have are largly unknow. So yes, it could have simular effects of the big bang. It could change the positions of elements into a different order then they were before. Also, it could be possible that the energy from it, if at the right distance and with the right conditions, could help spark life if we are to believe some of the creation
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Sure I know this. And of course I didn't RTFA. Well at least untill after i had alread posted that. But sometimes, wondering what if, leads to real science conducted by real scientist too.
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You wouldnt find something that leads to real since if you were a tour guide at MIT.
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BTW, the doc called and said to inform you that your cranial-rectal extraction was scheduled Saturday.
When Anomalous Becomes the Norm (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is the whole point of doing the research. (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact the whole idea is to sometimes find out surprising things that find flaws in the old models and give information to drive the creation of more accurate models. (One definition of information transfer is how much the receiver is surprised. B-) )
That's what we're spending all this money for: To come up with physics that more closely matches the real universe. To do this we have to know what's NOT matching in the old models.
(For those - ideally few of the slashdot participants - who gripe that it's being spent at all: At some point the improved models will almost certainly produce some new and useful technologies and/or end squandering of resources on the pursuit of dead-ends. Of course you can't know up front WHAT technologies it will affect. That's part of what you're finding out.;)
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The alternative could be to insist the old models are corect, channel all the funding into convincing other of this and then refute any attemp
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Just remember that pretty much whoever you give money to will spend it, so it's not like the money gets lost outside of the system. Even if the scientists blow all the money on booze, think about how much of that is tax that goes back into the system.
Quoth TFA (Score:1)
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Just about every time I report to people on this forum that observed data is conflicting with their defined model of the universe. I get moderated as troll. I really wish people would wake up and smell the coffee. The data is vastly different from the assumptions.
Doesn't anyone remember the Stardust recovery. It was going to find comet ice. Sorry folks... it must be summer and we just ran out of ice. Of course we have minerals that formed at high heat, (not cold temps) and which would have been dest
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Merely pointing this fact out as it occurs every time it occurs can have an impact in itself. Many people will wait until they see numerous others bringing this up to actually consider the concept. The great communicators today in astrophysics wi
Evidence for the Big Bang (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Firas_spectrum
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Are you aware that there are stars whose surface temperatures are too low to have fusion within their cores?
Are you aware that traditional cometary theory has basically been disconfirmed by the Stardust and Deep Impact missions?
Are you aware of the insane number of anomalies represented by rilles on the rocky planets within our own solar system? Many of these rilles actually travel both up and down with the topography of the land.
Have you reviewed the evidence by Halton Arp of high redshift quasa
The Universe IS NOT electric, get over it (Score:2)
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Not quite sure if you're talking to me or the other guy that I was talking with who agreed with me (I suppose both and all of the rest of us who are growing in numbers ...), but you seem to care a lot that other people believe something different than yourself. And I guess, quite ironically, that would make you quite a bad scientist as well (!) since the public expects that scientists remain open-minded in the face of evidence -- which, despite your assertion
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Who's "most people"?? From what I can gather, "most people" believe in some kind of god based creation, of CAUSE we're gonna keep finding things that don't fit that belief. As for people in the science community - they DON'T believe in some nice model they have fitting the way the universe works, that's why they're looking for things like this that go against the current models.
And that's why you're being modded as
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These things almost seem like the WMD of the future, the ability to wipe out all life within almost half a galaxy with a single explosion due to the concentration of gamma rays... kindof makes any nuke look insignificant...
Yes. Also extremely stupid unless you can deliver it from more than "half a galaxy" away :P.
Oh no, I just mentioned a weapons application... so if we suddenly see lots of funding of this research by the bush administration... we know why!
Getting old and tired there. Never attribute to conspiracy what may be explained by mere incompetence :P.
Re:...is anyone else reminded of TNG? (Score:5, Interesting)
GRBs are thought to emanate only from the poles of a supernova. So no, a GRB can indeed be 'aimed'.
I've often wondered if GRBs aren't simply the result of some technological civilization stumbling onto a new law of physics, and wiping themselves out in the process. It would certainly explain the absence of any voices in a galaxy that -- by now -- ought to be teeming with life.
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Maybe we are indeed seeing the outcome of this happening, just on a smaller scale. These guys are probably doing something incredously stupid, like playing with a very large ray canon or starting a large nuclear fusion reactor. Well, I say th
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The universe may be teeming with life - but not necessarily beyond 1 cell. In any case, our violent universe with massive active forces seems to be more significant than originally thought.
One thought is - what about intervening material screwing up polarization? Also, an afterglow is not the supernova light - it's the lower energy equivalent o
Actually, I see a correlation with black-holes... (Score:2, Interesting)
When a black hole forms, the matter trapped within the event horizon has (for all intents and purposes) left our universe. Perhaps GRB's are merely the thermodynamic return on all that lost mass?
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I also wondered what might happen to the matter trapped in the accretion disks of two black holes when they began to merge, especially if they had opposing rotation... matter travelling at virtually the speed of light, hitting yet more matter, travelling at virtually the speed of light in the opposite direction... meaning an effective speed of impact almost double the speed of light... and all that happening in an area of dilated time... you have to
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I haven't done the ma
I for one... (Score:1)
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But, even assuming frames of reference etc the relativistic mass of the matter involved in the collision would be HUGE, far more than the original matter... and I don't think all that would dissapear into the black holes for several reasons... but one main one comes to mind:
- The accretion disks are by definition not inside the event horizon of either black hole, and therefore not at the point where any en
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From your observer's perspective you might be thinking that all the collision will be in slo-mo which might be "interesting" or "the-matrix-movie-like", but in real-life you can only see photons, so everything will also be getting dimmer at the same time
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It's an interesting problem, and it deals with the generation of huge amounts of gravitational waves. The hope is that these simulations will now pave the way for wh
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However, the original question was about the accretion discs and being in some sort of time-dialated matrix-like slo-mo explosion, which is an entirely different thing...
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Just kidding, of course. Comments like these are exactly why I read Slashdot.
Re:Actually, I see a correlation with black-holes. (Score:5, Interesting)
The intense bursts of radiation observed from the vicinity of black holes (especially those forming as a result of supernovae) are generally the result of some pretty extreme interactions just before the matter enters the black hole, as this matter is subject to extreme heating and compression and such - enough, even, to perform fusion on some pretty tough stuff and get metals as heavy as uranium.
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Too long of a time delay? (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, is there any possibility of a dipole radiation distribution for the fraction of linear polarization? Perhaps for this particular sample, we caught the glimpse of a stellar pole? Wouldn't we need a larger sample size to make a more conclusive prediction if this was the case?
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fast, since previous attempts have taken several hours. Furthermore, the novel
polarimeter they built allows instantaneous measurement of polarisation and position
angle. These objects may be changing quickly so conventional optical polarimety
won't work.
Re:Too long of a time delay? (Score:4, Funny)
I think you're on to something here. Whoever created that thing could have screwed up any number of things:
- Incorrect dipole length, creating a bad radiation pattern
- Bad impedance match
- Incorrect balun use-- it is not needed unless the feed is unbalanced
- Forgot to factor in dielectric constants, although this is in vacuum so should be safe here
I would measure the VSWR and go from there.
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If it's emitted directionally perhaps you can only observe it when you're looking at a pole.
newest speculations (Score:1)