Gamma Rays: The Ultimate Action Movie

NASA must love their action movies - they've got that great big widescreen we see in all the space movies, all those comfy chairs in Mission Control, and apparently they've decided that Michael Bay doesn't make big enough explosions because they've sent up a satellite to look for more in the depths of the universe.  Because as we all know, if a Michael Bay movie doesn't have large enough detonations for you then nothing else on Earth does either.

They're searching for the deadliest detonations ever - gamma ray burst explosions.  Nobody knows exactly what causes these short but indescribably energetic explosions, but a leading suspect is the collision of two neutron stars or black holes (and when you're talking about those kind of energies, it's the biggest bang you can have without creating a new universe).  Another possibility is a super-supernova (superdupernova?), which isn't the usual boring business of a star exploding, but the nuclear devastation of an incredibly large star that would make Zeus battling Odin look like two kids fighting in a sandpit.

These events are so mind-bogglingly intense that they can be detected from billions of light years away (and so billions of years in the past).  Which is good, because you really don't want one to get any closer than that. One popular "sudden extinction" theory is that such a burst has happened within range of our own galaxy, but because the lethal gamma radiation moves at the speed of light, the first evidence we could 'detect' would be everybody and everything dropping dead.  The only people who could investigate it are those who evolve from particularly hardy bacteria hidden deep in a rock somewhere, evolving for billions of years then looking at fossils full of iPhones and saying "Hmm, I wonder why everybody fell over all of a sudden".

The Gamma Ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST) is set for launch in May of this year, the large area telescope set to detect high energy gamma blasts accompanied by a "Burst Monitor" to detect lower energy gamma bursts - the phrase "lower energy burst" occupying the same levels of irony as "shallower ocean", "cooler blowtorches" and "less painful pokes in the eye with a pitchfork".

Posted by Luke McKinney.

 

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Links:

NASA GLAST satellite  http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/24jan_glast.htm

Comments

[Jeff]

Good article, Luke! I enjoyed the crossover into cinematic destruction, but was mostly happy to hear GLAST in set for launch in May. Can't wait to see some of the photos.