Fermi and Swift Observe Record-setting Gamma Ray Burst 107
symbolset writes "Phys.org shares a visual image of a 'shockingly bright' gamma ray burst observed April 27th, labelled GRB 130427A and subsequently observed by ground optical and radio telescopes. One gamma ray photon from the event measured 94 billion electron volts — three times the previous record. The burst lasted four hours and was observable for most of a day — another record. Typical duration of a gamma ray burst is from 10 milliseconds to a few minutes. Astronomers will now train optical telescopes on the spot searching for the supernova expected to have caused it — typically one is observed some few days after the burst. They expect to find one by the middle of May. The event occurred about 3.6 billion lightyears distant which is fairly close as gamma ray bursts go. Click on the GIF to view the actual burst."
Need expert opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Need expert opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Anywhere in the Galaxy, if it were pointed in our direction. Maybe anywhere in the Local Group, if it were pointed right at us.
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Re:Need expert opinion (Score:5, Informative)
No. They may have detected something, and it's not gone through the pipeline yet, but Bert and Ernie were much before this event.
They [lanl.gov] were August 8, 2011 (Bert) and January 3, 2012 (Ernie).
Even if they didn't see a thing, I am sure there will be an IceCube press release about this in a few months, as they will be able to improve the GRB neutrino limit.
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This is late, I know, but for the record IceCube (the most sensitive neutrino telescope) has announced [nasa.gov] that it did not see any neutrinos from this GRB,
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I read 200 light years from a typical supernova lasting a few milliseconds.
Re:Need expert opinion (Score:5, Informative)
They have a lot of directionality. The physics is not completely understood, but gamma ray bursts are focused along a fairly narrow line in two opposite directions.
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Mind providing a reference? Some of us might like to acquire such memories.
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Space Battleship Yamato (Uch Senkan Yamato, also called Cosmoship Yamato) is a Japanese science fiction anime series featuring an eponymous spacecraft. It is also known to English-speaking audiences as Space Cruiser Yamato; an English-dubbed and heavily edited version of the series was broadcast on North American and Australian television as Star Blazers. The first two seasons ("Quest for Iscandar" and "The Comet Empire") of this version were broadcast in Greece in 1981-82 as Diastimóploio Argó ("Spaceship Argo"). An Italian-language version was also broadcast under the name Star Blazers in Italy, and a Portuguese-language version was successfully shown in Brazil under the title Patrulha Estelar ("Star Patrol") and Viaje a la Ultima Galaxia ("Voyage to the Final Galaxy") or Astronave Intrepido ("Starship Intrepid") in Spain and Latin America.
It is a seminal series in the history of anime, marking a turn towards more complex serious works and influencing works such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion; Hideaki Anno has ranked Yamato his favorite anime and credited it with sparking his interest in anime.
Yamato was the first anime series or movie to win the Seiun Award, a feat not repeated until the 1985 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
The show starts on a post-apocalyptic Earth, with humanity trying to survive a war with an alien race. The titular ship [wikipedia.org] is actually the wreck of the World War II battleship Yamato [wikipedia.org], rebuilt and converted into an FTL starship. The engine that allows supraluminal travel also powers a planet-busting spinal mount [firedrake.org] beam weapon, the Wave Motion Gun [tvtropes.org].
They recently did a live-action film [imdb.com], which had a pretty awful script. I found it entertaining in a cheesy/campy/back-to-childhoo
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Main beam cannons on giant robotic Japanese battleships manned by Japanese space chicks are generally pretty directional and very powerful...
Come to think of it, that post was probably referring to a more recent anime franchise, Macross/Robotech [wikipedia.org]. Space Battleship Yamato wasn't robotic and had a fairly balanced bridge crew, gender-wise. The SDF Macross, on the other hand, could transform into a giant robot and had a predominantly female bridge crew. Guess my age is showing. ;p
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Score 5; insightful?
All the GRBs we see are pointed right at us. They're highly directional; any GRBs that aren't pointed right at us we can't even detect.
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Re:Need expert opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
IIUC, while any that we can detect are pointed in our direction, there's a lot of halo around the core of the emission. We generally pick things up from that halo, but the core would be a lot more intense. If it were pointed right at us, that would mean that the most intense portion of the beam was pointed at us. There isn't much spread, but the signal has been spreading out slowly for many light-years. (Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Pick your incident to get your answer.) Even a laser spreads given that much distance. If there's no other reason, then there's bumpy space around stars, and variations in the galactic magnetic field.
So, yeah, unless they're very close we can't detect them unless they're pointed at us. But the directionality is sufficient that at sufficient distance there's a sufficient spread that most of the space where the signal can be detected is relatively weak compared to the central part of the beam.
OTOH, this is just "IIUC". I could be wrong. But I don't think so.
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If it's pointed right at us, I say we do the only sensible thing and shoot back!
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Umm, Chernobyl, when translated, is Wormwood. I'm not looking for another.
Re: Need expert opinion (Score:2)
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In fact the visible universe is significant bigger than 12 billion ly in radius, because the universe is expanding. The co-moving distance to the edge of the universe is more like 46 billion ly. See this wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] for more details. If this is true, 3.6 billion ly is about 8% of the distance to the edge of the visible universe, which represents a partial volume of (3.6/46)^3 = 5 10^{-4} the size of the visible universe (or 0.05%).
So this is indeed very close by and rare.
Cheers
This may be important for quantum gravity (Score:5, Informative)
The brightest Gamma ray bursts (GRB) are important for quantum gravity, as the photons have a short enough wavelength and go over long enough distances that spacetime foam [arxiv.org] should give them dispersion. The best test so far is based mostly on GRB 080916C [skyandtelescope.com], and from what I hear this new burst may be able to do better.
A little background.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle predicts "virtual" particles. The time part of the uncertainty principle is delta T delta E > h, where E is energy, T is time and h is Planck's constant (I am ignoring factors of 2 pi). As the time of an event (say, the time for a photon to travel one wavelength) gets shorter, the energy of the virtual particles allowed (delta E) gets bigger. For short enough time periods (i.e., near the Planck time), the energy is enough that the virtual particles are black holes, popping in and out of existence, and severely mangling the spacetime on that time / distance scale. This mangling is called "spacetime foam". The wavelength of the GRB photons is much larger than the Planck distance (roughly, the virtual black holes should live for a Planck time and have an event horizon the size of the Planck distance), but the GRBs are very far away, and the GRB photons pass over many, many, Planck distances along the way, and each adds a little nudge. This effect depends on the photon energy (it is larger for higher energies, as these are smaller photons), thus the "dispersion" mentioned in these papers.
The really cool thing is that the existing dispersion limits seem to be less than many people's expectations. If this is confirmed (and pushed down to a little smaller distance scale), then the conventional spacetime foam ideas I outlined above here may not be correct. This, in fact, may be the first evidence for the "holographic principle," which implies a smoother spacetime than the above ideas. In any case, this is the only way we have at present to say anything experimental about quantum gravity, so the more data the better.
Re:This may be important for quantum gravity (Score:5, Funny)
Mmm, hmm. I recognize some of these words.
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I'm uncertain about that one.
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:)
Re:This may be important for quantum gravity (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Is slashdot now making fun of the nerds for being smart?
You must be a ton of fun at parties. In this case, the poster is actually making fun of *himself* for not being as smart as the OP (or, possibly, simply for not being educated in the field the OP is talking about), not of the OP for being smarter than him. At worst, it is a comment on how specific and arcane the language of a specific field can become to the outside observer.
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You must be a ton of fun at parties.
I might be missing something, and you might be new here, but I usually leave CHA as it is and just count on natural 20s.
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Thank you.
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So basically, the spacetime foam theory is not playing out?
That's comforting, because it implies that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a bit more mundane than we think. I like to take it as an experimental practicality to "energy can be neither created nor destroyed"; but what I like is irrelevant to reality. However, if the spacetime foam is invalid, then the reality happens to be closer to what I imagine: a definition of existance and indeed space based on interactions between energetic particles,
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So basically, the spacetime foam theory is not playing out?
It's too soon to be sure, but, as the paper says,
That sure isn't what I would expect. Now, maybe the current thinking (really, just dimensional analysis) is missing something important, but if we can push that "slightly abov
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Got a question : as a proton, one among many, accelerates into a black hole, what is going on with the individual quarks? What shape do they form? What virtual particles are materialized, in what pattern? What structure do they develop?
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Got a question : as a proton, one among many, accelerates into a black hole, what is going on with the individual quarks? What shape do they form? What virtual particles are materialized, in what pattern? What structure do they develop?
Don't know. Nobody knows.
In GR, nothing much, until they fall into the singularity at the center of a black hole (although tidal forces would rip even a proton apart as it got close to the singularity, and that would generate a lot of particle production). At the singularity itself, the equations fail, and so GR makes no predictions.
In string theory there may be holographic effects that turn the event horizon into a "firewall," which has been in the scientific news a lot lately (search on "black hole firewa
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Well, consider this: whichever quark (R/G/B) is closest to the black hole, will experience the greatest acceleration. Therefore, it will be accelerated away from the other two, until the energy is enough to cause particle/antiparticle pair creation. But the particle/antiparticle pair will also be created between the quark and its partners... therefore, you will not get pair annhiliation of the outer two. The new pair can't catch the old pair.
Still, any distance between the new quark/antiquark (say, R/*R
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Re:This may be important for quantum gravity (Score:5, Interesting)
No, although that was entertained (by some) in the fairly long history of these bursts.
In the early days (after GRB were detected by US satellites sent up to look for nuclear explosions) there were lots of theories, as we knew basically nothing about them. The consensus was that GRB were probably fairly close to us, in the galaxy (which kept the burst energy reasonable). The early satellites could only see the brightest bursts, so there weren't many bursts observed, and statistics were very poor, so you couldn't say much more. (At this time I remember some people proposing primordial black hole explanations.) One of the major goals of the Compton Space Telescope BATSE experiment was to be sensitive enough to GRB to be able to observe hundreds to thousands of them, with decent positions, enough data so that you should be able to see the Milky Way (the galactic disk) in the burst locations (i.e., that you would see more bursts along the Milky Way in the sky than in other directions). At the time, the consensus opinion was very strongly that BATSE would see the plane of the Milky Way in the aggregate burst positions, as they accumulated.
The experiment was flown and worked well and recorded an isotropic (random) distribution of bursts. (So much for conventional wisdom.) This meant that the bursts were either very far away (and thus very powerful) or very close (and thus relatively weak, weak enough that you could only see them up to a few light years, where everything is in the galactic disk, and thus can look random in direction, the way the brightest stars in the night sky appear more-or-less random in direction). I actually toyed around with an extraterrestrial intelligence explanation for close bursts at that time (the bursts would be some side effect of power generation or space travel, which would have implied that the ETIs were close and ubiquitous), but most people started thinking about extremely distant (to be random), and thus very powerful events. (IIRC, this was bad but not quite fatal for the primordial black hole explanation, as those bursts are strong enough that you would expect to see the galactic disk in the accumulated BATSE data, but maybe you could adjust things enough to get around that.)
This conundrum was resolved by the orbiting Swift telescope, which could not only see GRB, but could report a position back to Earth quickly enough to train an optical telescope on the spot within a few seconds. This was flown, and some GRBs were observed in the optical. (This also required some serious work on rapid response optical telescopes.) Swift + optical meant that we knew their positions very accurately, so the biggest telescopes could be used to see where, exactly, they were coming from (which turned out to be distant galaxies) and thus get a red shift, and thus a distance (the GRB of the OP is apparently at a red shift of 0.34). That, among other things, showed very clearly that these bursts could not be primordial black holes (or local ETI!), as those are much too weak to see bursting across cosmological distances.
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you're welcome
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Just think of it as nerd humor.
Note - Fermi detected a 94 GeV photon [cosmoquest.org] from Gamma Ray Burst GRB 130427A (over 1/2 the Higgs energy), and many photons in the GeV range, which bodes well for quantum gravity constraints.
That photon had a wavelength of ~ 10^-17 meters, or 10 million yoctometers
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This is very late, but just in case, a brief answer.
The virtual particles in question would be massive enough and small enough that in GR they would be full fledged black holes.
Re:Betelgeuse? (Score:5, Funny)
Nope, I am going to go with the scientists here and say its very credible that it was a Galaxy far far away. Also a long long time ago.
So I'm going to further speculate that it was the death star blowing up the Aldebaran system. Or perhaps the deathstar being blown up it self.
Now how the Ewoks would survive such a massive gamma burst is anyones guess.
Re:Betelgeuse? (Score:5, Funny)
I believe the Ewoks survive it by chortling, giggling, and jumping up and down. Did you wish to propose an alternative survival method?
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Lol!
They were shielded by their gold plated demigod from the worst of it =)
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Very appropriate for Star Wars Day!
On a (very slightly) more serious note, Kardashev type III civilizations might be able to weaponize Gamma Ray Bursts, and take out an entire Galaxy the way the Death Star took out Alderaan. I suspect that even Darth Vader would find that impressive.
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Hehe, thanks for catching the misspelling of Alderaan (bad me). I knew I got it wrong. But yeah, I like the Kardashev scale also.
TBH I didn't realize it was Star Wars Day. Though I do like Star Wars quite a bit =) so my coincidental celebration of it is great!
Re:Betelgeuse? (Score:4, Funny)
May the 4th... be with you.
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Being curious - is this 'may the 4th' be with you something that has been going on for a while or just a rather smart viral marketing by Disney?
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I have seen it for years, and I am not a Star Wars fan (not since Episode 1).
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I first head it at a Dragoncon in a galaxy (Georgia, USA) far away and a time (over 20 years ago) far far away. A New Hope was playing the main hall that night and the later dance ball with half the strippers in Atlanta was pretty epic.
Kinda lodges in the brain.
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I did that all much later than you, but the memories I have of Georgia are fond as well =) Nice to know its an ongoing tradition. I will make a mental effort to remember next year.
Re:Betelgeuse? (Score:4, Funny)
As shown in historical media, the blast of the exploding Deathstar expanded on a two dimensional plane. This plane obviously did not bisect the ewok's midichlorians.
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Nope, I am going to go with the scientists here and say its very credible that it was a Galaxy far far away. Also a long long time ago.
So I'm going to further speculate that it was the death star blowing up the Aldebaran system. Or perhaps the deathstar being blown up it self.
Now how the Ewoks would survive such a massive gamma burst is anyones guess.
Ewoks are obviously highly resistant to gamma ray radiation due to their furry coating.
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse (Score:3)
Re:Betelgeuse? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it was Betelgeuse, you would know it. It would probably be bright enough to be seen during daylight in the visible light range, let alone invisible GRBs.
Thing is, unless Betelgeuse happened to have it's axis pointed right at us, we wouldn't be hit by a beam of radiation that sometimes forms at the poles of a supernova/black hole. If that beam was not pointed right at us, we are far enough away that the rest of the supernova products would not cause us more than a light show.
Supernovae need to be around 50 light years away or less to cause serious issues for us, unless the energy was very concentrated (like the jets from certain types of black holes). Betelgeuse is not that close. Indeed, no candidates for a supernova are known to be within that radius at this time.
Re:Betelgeuse? (Score:5, Interesting)
This Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) was stronger than a typical GRB, and a typical GRB is much stronger than a typical supernova, at least in the beam. This paper [arxiv.org] considers the effects of a GRB at 2 kpc, or 6000 light years, or over 100 times further away than the 50 ly supernova limit. I don't know any details of the new GRB, but if it was as bright as they are implying, it could have been dangerous from the galactic center or beyond.
There is one asterisk here - a supernova will be dangerous for some time (possibly months), while a GRB lasts seconds. A GRB, even if it totally roasts one hemisphere of a planet, would miss the other side, while a SN could get both sides. There might be second order effects from the GRB (such as some sort of nuclear winter) that could cause havoc, but a single GRB just might not be able to totally sterilize a planet from 20,000 light years away. (The 50 ly supernova limit is not that firm, either). We don't know for sure in either case, and I for one would not like to find out.
New low for slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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Okay, News: the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.
Uh, 87 zillion volts? (Score:2)
How can a photon have volts? Aren't all photons created equal?
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Re:Uh, 87 zillion volts? (Score:5, Informative)
"electron volt" is a unit of energy --- specifically, the energy required to move one electron charge across one volt of electrical potential. 1 joule is ~6.2*10^18 electron volts. And no, all photons aren't "equal" --- they have different energies (equivalently, different wavelengths, frequencies, momenta, or colors for visible-range photons). For comparison, visible light photons are ~2 electron volts energy.
Colour (Score:4, Funny)
Aren't all photons created equal?
No, that was the early black and white universe: for the last 13.8 billion years we've had colour.
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A page with technical details (Score:5, Informative)
I wrote up a short summary of the observational details for one of my classes -- you can find it at
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys443/lectures/grb130427a/grb130427a.html [rit.edu]
You can also follow a nice summary of the latest results by following Don Alexander's thread on the Cosmoquest forum:
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?143754-GRB-130427A-burst-of-the-(quarter)-century [cosmoquest.org]
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Very nice write-up.
Enrico Fermi and Jonathan Swift? (Score:1)
I have just imagined http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi [wikipedia.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift [wikipedia.org] looking at a supernova. Maybe someone can guess what they would say to each other about it, but I have no idea.
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1. Fermi was a Physicist, not Swift.
2. No mentioning of a supernova.
3. No explanation of a time travel.
4. Everyone is out of character, not a single sentence sounds even remotely like anything Fermi or Swift would say. Absolutely nothing about nuking people or eating babies.
5. The whole thing looks like a result of text substitution performed on some fanfiction.
Remove all gay sex, and Fox will commit to make at least 10 seasons of a show out of that story.
wavelength (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes. Trying to constrain spacetime foam with these photons (see my post way above) is harder than trying to learn something about atoms using your hands (only 10 orders of magnitude or so), and yet over 3 billion years of travel, even little things add up.
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Should "how much smaller it is due to the expansion" be "how much smaller it originally was before the red-shift expanded it to give us this still amazingly small wavelength" ?
in a galaxy far far away... (Score:2)
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This event seems to be powerful enough to rip part of a galaxy apart, and kill everything that might have been alive in the rest of it. But given how far back in time it is, I don't think life had emerged, yet.
How far away is it, really? (Score:2)
The article says it is 3.6 billion light years away. But when is that distance applicable? This event happened long, long ago and we are just now seeing it. But was the 3.6 Gly the distance back when it happened? Or is the 3.6 Gly the distance today, when we see it? Given the purported expansion of the universe, this matters.
We can see these past events happen because they were far enough away when they happened. We cannot see most recent events because the light has not gotten here yet (unless the ev
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Go on the Cosmology Calculator [ucla.edu], put in the red shift (z = 0.34) and (for the default cosmological model, which is pretty good now-a-days) you get
The light travel time was 3.751 Gyr.
The comoving radial distance, which goes into Hubble's law, is 1330.7 Mpc or 4.340 Gly.
The angular size distance DA is 993.0 Mpc or 3.2389 Gly.
Supernovae embargo ! (Score:1)
I see already some politicians in the US asking for a military intervention to all possible supernovae as they are an external treat to the US...