Quote:
Originally Posted by glenn II
o.k. I am so new to this that I make new borns look old but I have such a huge interest in the universe around us that it makes me giggle like school child every time I look up and try to see as deeply as I can into the night sky. It boggles me to the point of losing my mind.
My question if it can be construed as such is, Where does the matter and gasses that get caught up in a gamma ray burst end up? Could a gamma ray burst posibly be explained as a stunami of the cosmos? Where are the ending points of the Bursts and what is left there?
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Welcome glenn II. First,don't lose that awesome feeling about the universe.
Second. The best models of gamma ray bursts indicate that they are in all liklihood of two different origins.
1.Some are thought to be due to neutron star mergers, spiraling in in a few seconds, and are of short duration. The vicinity of these is usually low in matter and dust, and it is ionized as they do so, later cooling back to gas.
2. The second source is supernovae. The explosions are axisymmetric, meaning they blow their tops and bottoms off, and the gamma rays escape predominantly in a beam along the axis of symmetry from the poles. Indications are that beaming factors (collimation in starspeak) are around a factor of 10,000. These are of longer duration. Matter and gas is definitely blasted away here, and was observed leaving the vicinity of SN1987a at around 9/10 the speed of light (0.9 c). The rest of the blast usually forms a barrel-shaped remnant, whether of type 2 (core collapse), or type1a (white dwarf with bloated companion).
There are some oddities.
1.Because of the beaming, most of the bursts don't come "this way" and supernovae go off without us seeing a burst.
2. Some long bursts have not had an optical counterpart, but it's possible it was a dust obscured infrared signal we did not see at the time.
3. There is nothing to preclude a neutron star from circulating through your home galaxy (unless you're an alien), the Milky Way, and crash through the roof of your house during the night creating a small burst, because they do travel up out of the plane of the galaxy's disk and then back down again...except for the fact that our very best instruments and astronomers have determined that there are no neutron stars closer than ~ a few hundred light years, and that's a few thousand years of travel time away. So you can sleep at night and still think the sky is awesome...
pete