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“As a result of them, we can look at the star origination right from the first times they were formed.”

An illustration of a supernova launching the most powerful gamma-ray burst ever seen (Image credit: Aaron M. Geller / Northwestern / CIERA / IT Research Computing and Data Services.)

We are now more than one step away from understanding how gamma -ray bursts origin may be some of the strongest ever explosions in known fleet.

Surrounding the chronic difficulties, a single gamma-ray burst, or GRB, can give rise to much more energy in seconds than the one emitted by the Sun for billions of years. Since such energy sources are not common under all conditions, it is thought by theorists that GRBs happen during some of the most epic of top-drawer events in the universe. This goes beyond things like supernova explosions marking the death of the most massive stars and the merger and collision of, the infamous pair of neutron stars, which are these dead/deceased stars made of the densest matter that we currently know of, to mention just a few.

While much has been discovered about the type of explosions in GRB and what the factors could be that cause a type of bitter to last for more time than 2 s or less than that, there is still a great deal of mystery that surrounds some of the key aspects both in GRB mechanism and the “long vs short” GRB explainers.

An University of Alabama in Huntsville team scientists, for example, are trying to shed more light on the afterproductions of GRBs and their altering intensity with time in attempt to better mimic these eruptions and to find out the truth behind them.

“Like many other astronomical phenomena which have been studied for more than 50 years, the main physical mechanisms behind gamma ray bursts are still obscure. This is one of the greatest mysteries that modern astrophysics still face,” team leader, Jon Hakkila, who is a scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said in an interview. “Unearthing GRBs enables us to see the shortcuts created by nature in the speed and power of the light emitted.”

“Going by the fact that they are the brightest sources astronomers have studied, GRBs can be viewed from far ends in the universe and light, at finite velocity, travels back in time from such extreme sources which helps us to decipher the early star-formation in the universe.”

Shining a light on GRBs

The main reason why development of theoritical models to describe whether them have been unsuccessful is that there are no models that can illustrate the behavior of their light curves which are a complex relationship that illutrates the intensity of the light over time.

However, issues related to the fact that no GRB light curves are exactly the same are again there, and that duration time can vary from tens of milliseconds up to tens of minutes.

Hakkila and otherscarried out simulations of GRBs accounting their release as energetic pulses of repeated nature that took single pulses as the basic blocks of GRBs. “They may reveal times when a GRB gets brighter and then dims. A time when a bursting star glitters and returns back to the former state, with timescales that can be as short as nanoseconds,” Hakkila said. “The more interesting aspect of these varieties is the fact that they are reversible in the way [palindrome] terms, like ‘rotator’ or ‘kayak’, are reversible.”

The scientist pointed out that it is very difficult to explain how can it be the case that you can reverse time since in this case it is the same way as that of the letters that make up words.

In his statement he said that ” the process which is responsible to form the light in the GRB pulse had to generate a lightpattern, then the pattern is repeated just after that.” Actually, that is not the only funny thing about them. They are really awesome!

A supermassive black hole sends out relativistic jets accompanied by a gamma ray burst. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

The team therefore was concerned with the models of GRBs that were the result of young black holes (ceasing to exist after the supernova) which were moving near the speed of light in the form of high-speed jets of particles.

Revealing how the collapse of a black hole at the heart of a massive star dying can generate powerful jets of energy, Hakkila brings out, “in these simulations the collapsing core leads to the formation of a black hole, and the matter falling into the black hole is torn apart and the energy from it gets redirected into powerful jets of material in two opposite directions.” “The jet matter that goes into directly our direction along is thrown outward with a velocity of the light about.

“The GRB is short-lived, and we have always taken it for granted that the jet has continued to point towards us constantly throughout the event. Nevertheless, the reverse-time pattern of pulses has been really baffling as to how we can explain if they are coming from in the non-moving jet.”

The team has suggested the phenomenon of lateral, or sideways, motion to relativistic jets dirtalking away from baby black holes to explain the recurrence of GRB light curves.

A laterally traveling jet is an elegant way of explaining a peculiar fact – that the origin time of some GRBs is considerably higher than we observe in the Gamma-Ray Burst instrument. “For a spectator who is following the line-of-sight of the lightening, the light produced first by one side of an moving needle will appear, then from the middle, and finally from the other side of this moving needle.”

This is like a switch. The jet at the beginning will be mainly bright but at the other end be more or less in the back of the light. The inner circle of the jet is symmetrically around the jet.

Hakkila confirmed this model by saying that it is the type of extreme force that comes from a jet from the black hole and ejects water from the fire hose. He said, an observer would see only the flowing fluid rather than the plane itself. Therefore the entire jet even with its perfectly straight trajectory would appear to be curved.

“The piston motion leads to the pieces of jet being exposed to us, which might have been captured from different edges of the jet. And this can as well be a chance to know more about how the jet produces light, in addition to a laboratory where we can study the effects of special relativity,” he ended.

The investigators have released their study under a title “A late Type Low Mass Close Binary Brown Dwarf Pair” on Apr 22 in the Journal of Astrophysics.

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