WASHINGTON, March 19 — Astronomers who flipped their telescopes to see a gamma ray burst “live” said Wednesday they witnessed the death of a gigantic star and the birth of what looks like a black hole. They said NASA’s High-Energy Transient Explorer satellite, ground-based robotic telescopes and fast-thinking researchers around the globe managed to catch the fleeting flash of energy.
“IF A GAMMA RAY BURST is the birth cry of a black hole, then the HETE satellite has just allowed us into the delivery room,” Derek Fox of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said in a statement.
“This stunning observation places us in the fiery throes of a star explosion, peering through the debris at a newly formed black hole within,” said Anne Kinney, NASA’s director for astronomy and physics.
Writing in the journal Nature, Fox and colleagues said their observations help support the theory that gamma-ray bursts come from stars as they collapse to become black holes. A black hole is a pinpoint of matter that is so dense —because it contains the mass of a star — that nothing can escape it.
These spinning objects suck in surrounding matter with their tremendous gravitational forces.
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http://www.msnbc.com/news/887706.asp
“IF A GAMMA RAY BURST is the birth cry of a black hole, then the HETE satellite has just allowed us into the delivery room,” Derek Fox of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said in a statement.
“This stunning observation places us in the fiery throes of a star explosion, peering through the debris at a newly formed black hole within,” said Anne Kinney, NASA’s director for astronomy and physics.
Writing in the journal Nature, Fox and colleagues said their observations help support the theory that gamma-ray bursts come from stars as they collapse to become black holes. A black hole is a pinpoint of matter that is so dense —because it contains the mass of a star — that nothing can escape it.
These spinning objects suck in surrounding matter with their tremendous gravitational forces.
Want to learn more?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/887706.asp