Interesting article. I would think it a good omen that it reached the public on the same day a new grb lit up the sky. http://grb.sonoma.edu/
just call me Novice Barry

Could somebody please explain this? Do we get unusual spectra because photons are being emitted from these "space" molecules with energies and conditions that we don't understand?

Redshift?

"Intrinsically, this afterglow is the second brightest ever seen. That's the only reason we were able to observe it at all," Prochaska says.

I calculated that for them. Might even be the brightest, but I don't have any photometry yet.

Thanks Astrofiend.

The evidence for supermassive black holes is so compelling that it would take nothing short of the biblical apocalypse to overthrow it. I guarantee whatever 'idea' you are peddling could not explain the most basic observations that astronomers have made over the years regarding these objects.

And, no the Schwarzchild singularity may not exist – quantum gravity (in whatever form it ends up coming in) will likely overthrow that idea. But the existence of a singularity and the existence of black holes are two separate issues. One has to do with the existence of an object in and of itself, and one has to do with a very specific (and non-critical) property of said object. Black holes can (and probably do) exist without singularities.

Finally – a quote from an authority figure such as Einstein means nothing – he was a brilliant physicist, but still just a man. He got plenty right and plenty wrong in his life. He also worked almost a century ago, when physics was in a very much less advanced state than it is today. Why would he have any clue as to whether an esoteric property of an esoteric object was one way or the other? He may as well have been theorising about trends in computing and information technology – the necessary groundwork was not in place for him to make an informed decision at the time, even though it may have appeared to be to him as though it was.

"I thought that GRB's occurred at the scale of the super massive black hole rather than the stellar scale. The difference is many orders of magnitude.

Can someone set me straight on this?"

Hi Ayti – a quick and dirty quote from wikipedia for you, which basically sums up the current paradigm:

"There are at least two different types of progenitors (sources) of GRBs: one responsible for the long-duration, soft-spectrum bursts and one (or possibly more) responsible for short-duration, hard-spectrum bursts. The progenitors of long GRBs are believed to be massive, low-metallicity stars exploding due to the collapse of their cores. The progenitors of short GRBs are still unknown but mergers of neutron stars is probably the most popular model as of 2007."

It is possible you were thinking about quasars, which are indeed powered by supermassive black holes.

"…the 'Schwarzschild singularities' do not exist in physical reality." — Albert Einstein, 1939

Can someone set me straight on this?