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Intergalactic Bad Ass
By Josh Witten | December 10th 2008 11:32 AM | 5 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Josh Witten

100% of this the rugbyologist's revenue is donated to Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres). A click on one of my articles is a click that helps bring high quality medical care to the... Full Bio

I'm no astronomy expert.  I'm probably even lousy at showing a casual interest.  But, gamma ray bursts are just cool.  They are essentially the most energetic events in the universe, since the Big Bang.  My general understanding is they occur when a giant star collapses into a black hole.  Looks like folks at GORT just imaged a brand new gamma ray burst.  Check out the pictures at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog.  It may not look like much, but remember one of these things could deep fry the Earth from over 500 light years away.  Don't know about you, but gamma ray burst is how I want to go extinct.

Comments

Hank's picture
'GORT bags a burst' is a cool title - and it's even cooler that it's something you can build yourself and find this stuff, should you have the time, inclination and $20K.

Hank Campbell | 12/10/08 | 12:50 PM
Becky Jungbauer's picture
Agreed. I fully support awesome scientific names and acronyms that sound like a language you'd hear on Star Wars (IV, V and VI, not the newer ones). I liked the description of the gamma ray screaming through the universe and then gently touching Earth. Reminds me of the wooly mammoth who lives next door, masquerading as a golden retriever named Rosie, who comes flying through the yard at mach 10 but is so gentle with little kids. (I've personally been flipped in the air and thrown a few feet by said mammoth, so I can only imagine what a gamma ray burst would do to the planet.)

Becky Jungbauer | 12/10/08 | 14:11 PM
jtwitten's picture
As Phil Plait explained in his blog, they apparently shoe-horned a relevant name onto the acronym GORT, so they could name it after the robot from the classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

Josh Witten | 12/10/08 | 14:38 PM
Hank's picture
Who says astrophysicists aren't edgey?!?

I am kind of looking forward to the remake, even though it is a classic.   Keanu Reeves gets to play an alien with no knowledge of idiom and no emotions.  That's pretty perfect casting.  Klaatu barata nicto!

Hank Campbell | 12/10/08 | 15:04 PM
Not so long ago I was reading "The Nature of the Physical World" by Sir Arthur Eddington, which was compiled from the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, from 1927 or 8 as I remember. In these he introduced his audience to Relativity and the very earliest bits of quantum mechanics. He told his audience that if you were to ride a photon from Sirius to Earth (which from our viewpoint would take 8 years), the elapsed time (strictly proper time) that you would experience on your ride would be precisely zero.

The same would apply if you very travelling on one of the gamma-ray bursts, however far away.

Anonymous (not verified) | 12/10/08 | 14:31 PM

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