First, a little about gamma-ray bursts. They come in two varieties: long and short.
The long bursts can go on for more than two seconds (yeah, that’s the long variety), and appear to be caused when the core of a massive star collapses into a black hole. Two seconds from star to black hole.
The short variety can burst for milliseconds, and appear to be the merger of two compact objects. For example, if you have two neutron stars orbiting one another, their orbits will eventually decay to the point that they merge. Not just neutron stars, though, you could have a black hole and a neutron star.
This new explosion detected by Swift lasted for 102 seconds. That’s in the long territory; however, the light curve better matched the characteristics of a short explosion. It was like neutron stars were merging for nearly two minutes, when they should have taken only milliseconds.
Unfortunately, astronomers have no idea what caused this. “This is brand new territory; we have no theories to guide us,” noted one of the astronomers, Neil Gehrels at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
One interesting theory is that it was actually the merger of a neutron star or a black hole with a white dwarf. Instead of the instantaneous collision, the white dwarf took a full 102 seconds to be torn apart. Thanks to David Alexander Kann for additional details on this.
Last November, NASA's Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinish, one of the…
Steven Hawking famously calculated that black holes should evaporate, converting into particles and energy over…
NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its…
The JWST is astronomers' best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect…
First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is…
A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it's center seems…