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Author Topic:   NASA observes new born black holes
Sylas
Member (Idle past 5250 days)
Posts: 766
From: Newcastle, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2002


Message 1 of 2 (236340)
08-24-2005 8:17 AM


This just in on the astronomy front...
Baby black holes apparently come into the world kicking and screaming, not unlike humans. And they're fussy eaters, too. Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite say they have found newborn black holes, just seconds old, in a confused state of existence, sloppily gorging on material falling into them while somehow propelling other material away at great speeds.
-- From Scientists Watch Baby Black Hole Get to Work Fast, a NASA feature story released Aug 18.
There will be a paper appearing in the Sept 9 issue of the journal Science; one the the world's leading scientific journals.
This is way cool -- and unexpected.
SWIFT is a two year mission to study gamma ray bursts. It has three main instruments; an XRAY telescope, an ultraviolet and visible light telescope, and a "Burst Detector". The idea is that the burst detect identifies a gamma ray burst, and then swings the satellite around to bring the telescopes to bear. SWIFT has already been useful in bringing new data for astronomers.
NASA report on SWIFT writes:
These black holes are born in massive star explosions. An initial blast obliterates the star. Yet the chaotic black hole activity appears to re-energize the explosion again and again over the course of several minutes. This is a dramatically different view of star death, one that entails multiple explosive outbursts and not just a single bang, as previously thought.
"Stars are exploding two, three and sometimes four times in the first minutes following the initial explosion," said Prof. David Burrows of Penn State, lead author on a paper appearing online today on Science Express and in the September 9 issue of Science. "First comes a blast of gamma rays followed by intense pulses of X-rays. The energies involved are much greater than anyone expected."
Scientists have seen this phenomenon in nearly half of the longer gamma-ray bursts detected by Swift so far. These gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions known, are harbingers of a type of massive star explosion called a hypernova, bigger than a supernova. With the Swift satellite, scientists are finally able to see gamma-ray bursts within minutes after the trigger, instead of hours or days, and are now privy to newborn black hole activity.
Until this latest Swift discovery, scientists had assumed a simple scenario of a single explosion followed by a graceful afterglow of the dying embers. ...
In my view, we are right now in a golden age of new discovery in cosmology. It is one of the most dynamic and exciting areas of science. We've discovered so much, and yet the new data is still pouring in and forcing us to revise what we thought we knew. The excitement comes when you find that dividing line between two forms of sterile complacency... between thinking you have all the answers that matter and the rest is minor detail, and thinking that we can never know anything and that uninformed guesswork is as good as anything else.
There is a website where you can actually find out about the observations from day to day. SWIFT is picking up these massive explosions at the rate of one every couple of days; and other observatories also make occasional contributions. The web site is http://grb.sonoma.edu/. There is a scrolling lists of bursts; click to get more detail of what was observed. This is an amazing site, able to bring cutting edge big project astronomy right into your computer screen as it happens.
To learn more about "gamma ray bursts"; google will bring up lots of informative sites. But I recommend you start with Gamma Ray Bursts: Introduction to a Mystery, at their "Imagine the Universe" site. This is a NASA educational resource intended for kids, 14 and up. It's high quality, with lots of scope to press deeper. I frankly use it as a resource to help get a handle on the subject.
Cheers -- Sylas

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Message 2 of 2 (236374)
08-24-2005 10:01 AM


Thread copied to the NASA observes new born black holes thread in the Big Bang and Cosmology forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.

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