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Nov 11, 2022

Black holes don’t always power gamma-ray bursts, new research shows

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics, satellites

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been detected by satellites orbiting Earth as luminous flashes of the most energetic gamma-ray radiation lasting milliseconds to hundreds of seconds. These catastrophic blasts occur in distant galaxies, billions of light years from Earth.

A sub-type of GRB known as a short-duration GRB starts life when two neutron stars collide. These ultra-dense stars have the mass of our sun compressed down to half the size of a city like London, and in the final moments of their life, just before triggering a GRB, they generate ripples in space-time—known to astronomers as gravitational waves.

Until now, space scientists have largely agreed that the “engine” powering such energetic and short-lived bursts must always come from a newly formed black hole (a region of where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it). However, new research by an international team of astrophysicists, led by Dr. Nuria Jordana-Mitjans at the University of Bath, is challenging this scientific orthodoxy.

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