Brightest stellar explosion ever seen

Brightest stellar explosion ever seen

Posted 09-11-2008 by Daniel Pendick

Yesterday, I participated in a press teleconference announcing new observations and research on the brightest bang ever seen in the sky. Astronomers on Earth saw it March 19, 2008, but it actually happened 7.5 billion years ago when a massive star collapsed and formed a black hole, producing an event astronomers call a gamma-ray burst. For about 40 seconds, its optical flash was visible to the naked eye. You’ll see lots of coverage of this in the science press today and tomorrow. GRB 080319B

Astronomers from around the world combined data from ground- and space-based telescopes to study the gamma-ray burst called GRB 080319B. Near-light-speed jets beam outward from GRBs. One of the jets just happened to be pointed right at us, which is why it looked so bright. Picture it as a shotgun blast of gamma rays.

As I was thinking of what to say in this blog, I ruminated a bit on press conferences. So here’s some of the splash and foam from my stream of consciousness.

I recalled an excellent documentary I saw a few weeks ago about the press coverage of the Kennedy assassination. Press conferences in those days were white-knuckle affairs, tense with the reality that you had to be RIGHT THERE — on the scene — to get the story.

It looked something like this: A police officer steps out of a doorway. Cameras and print reporters with snap-brimmed hats crowd around. There’s jockeying for position, particularly by the photographers. Shoving and even the occasional punch thrown weren’t unheard of. Then the mad scramble to find a phone and file the story before the others.

When I went to my first press conferences, it wasn’t quite so gritty, but there was still tension in the air. Sometimes you had to be aggressive in a packed room to get your question in. I remember approaching someone in a hallway for an interview and being hip-checked out of the way by a fleet-footed pixie of a TV reporter half my weight and a foot shorter. She sure knew how to get the story.

Today I just dialed a special access number and provided a pass code assigned to me by a press officer by e-mail. The teleconference was conducted at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. I was in Wisconsin.

The technology is superb these days. You can listen to experts comment on the discovery while watching PowerPoint presentations online. By punching in *1, a friendly operator puts you in the queue to ask a question. No shouting and wildly gesturing to get noticed — you just wait your turn. They can hear you, and you can hear them. And you can benefit from insightful questions from other reporters. Not to mention not being hip-checked by fleet-footed pixies.

I guess it takes a little of the romance out of it, but then again, flying out to Goddard for the afternoon wasn’t an option.

Comments (1) | Tags: Daniel Pendick, NASA, conferences

Comments

yaschmidt said:

What was observed was one of the largest phase transitions in known history.

OK, that was not much of a lead-in, but what I believe you are watching when a stellar mass collapses into a black hole is simply a phase transition from gas/solid to something even less energetic than a solid. In fact, I consider it likely that a black hole is two steps below solid, since I believe (my OPINION) that neutron stars are really an intermediate step, with the strong nuclear force failing to keep the electrons and the nucleus protons apart, causing a more dense state of matter.

Another point that indicates a change in phase is occuring is the attendant release of energy. In the same way you need to introduce energy to make a solid heat-up and then transition to a liquid, you must remove energy to move DOWN the matter state scale (say, from a gas to a liquid). In my opinion, the attendant GRB, or other tremendous releases of energy seen during black hole formation (or the continued consumption of mass by a black hole) is simply the release of transitional energy during the change of matter from one state to a lower energy state (Dark Matter).

From here on out, please keep in mind two numbers to get an idea of the scale I am talking about. A neutron star is roughly ten to the fifteenth power more dense than the Earth is. Amongst Planck's famous calculations, Planck's density (the theoretical maximum density) is ten to the ninety-plus power more dense than Earth. Consider then that I could say (theoretically) that if a star 100 times more massive than our sun were to collapse into something so much more dense that it takes ninety zeros to describe the difference in densities, the new object could have the same mass and still be smaller by a factor of 1 over a 1 followed by 88 zeros. Simply put, most stellar black holes are too small to measure.

I believe that the reason scientists have a problem grasping what seems such a self-evident simplicity is that their lack of measurable data causes them to create their own mathematical solutions to abstract ideas, which is (again, in my opinion) why we have theories like Hawkings Radiation, singularity, and parallel universes. In the same way that we test most contaminants in environmental work down to parts per million/billion/even trillion, we could not detect one part in ten to the ninetieth power. Likewise, there is no way to measure such a large number, with present technologies, with any sense of precision. Does that change the fact that such dense items might exist? How many paradigms have to collapse before man understands that man does not understand all that much?

In considering this problem, this relatively simple solution also describes, or at least seems to show, that a photon of light DOES have mass. Beyond the obvious theoretical point that it would be difficult to have energy without mass, consider that light waves are clearly affected by a black hole's gravity. Why....because they have mass! Again, that mass may be so small that we cannot measure it with existing technologies, but it defies logic to assume that pure energy can exist without some mass. The only reason this effect can be seen with black holes, but not on Earth, is that gravitional pull is a function of two masses and the distance between them. Since the mass of light is so incredibly small (I have no theories on how small), the pull of any Earthly mass is simply too small to measurably affect the tiny mass of a photon of light. The mass of a black hole, and especially a supermassive black hole, is so incredibly great, however, that you can actually measure the effect on light (again, refer to a density which is ten to the ninetieth power more dense than the Earth!) The mass of the black hole makes-up for the lack of mass of the light photon.

Clearly, this is a topic which requires more than five paragraphs to hash-out. The point of this comment is to steer thinking about the nature of black holes and several other galactic phenomena back to reality. The truth is, I think reality, once considered rationally, is far more interesting than impressively complex mathematical equations that prove that gentlemen like Stephen Hawkings are mathematical geniuses with little or no concept of reality.

September 16, 2008 11:47 AM