Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the UniverseAbout three times a day our sky flashes with a powerful pulse of gamma ray bursts (GRB), invisible to human eyes but not to astronomers' instruments. The sources of this intense radiation are likely to be emitting, within the span of seconds or minutes, more energy than the sun will in its entire 10 billion years of life. Where these bursts originate, and how they come to have such incredible energies, is a mystery scientists have been trying to solve for three decades. The phenomenon has resisted study -- the flashes come from random directions in space and vanish without trace -- until very recently. In what could be called a cinematic conflation of Flash Gordon and The Hunt for Red October, Govert Schilling's Flash!: The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe describes the exciting and ever-changing field of GRB research. Based on interviews with leading scientists, Flash! provides an insider's account of the scientific challenges involved in unravelling the enigmatic nature of GRBs. A science writer who has followed the drama from the very start, Schilling describes the ambition and jealousy, collegiality and competition, triumph and tragedy, that exists among those who have embarked on this recherche. Govert Schilling is a Dutch science writer and astronomy publicist. He is a contributing editor of Sky and Telescope magazine, and regularly writes for the news sections of Science and New Scientist. Schilling is the astronomy writer for de Volkskrant, one of the largest national daily newspapers in The Netherlands, and frequently talks about the Universe on Dutch radio broadcasts. He is the author of more than twenty popular astronomy books, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on astronomy. |
Contents
The bat mystery | 24 |
A duel over distance | 40 |
Liras tears and satellites | 57 |
Beaming in on afterglows | 72 |
First among equals | 91 |
Eavesdropping on heavenly whispers | 109 |
Thinking with the speed of light | 128 |
Competition for the big bang | 144 |
Alchemists of the cosmos | 176 |
The magnetar attraction | 190 |
The Argus eyes of Livermore | 207 |
Fireworks and black holes | 225 |
A flashing future | 241 |
War and peace | 256 |
Acronyms | 273 |
ΙΟ Curious connections | 160 |
Common terms and phrases
afterglow of GRB Akerlof Alamos Amsterdam astronomers Astrophysical BATSE BATSE detectors BeppoSAX big bang black hole Bohdan Paczyński Chryssa Kouveliotou cloud colleagues Compton Gamma Ray cosmic cosmos Costa Dale Frail detected discovery distance distant galaxies Djorgovski Don Lamb earth energy error box faint Fishman flashes Frail gamma ray bursts gamma ray detectors Gamma Ray Observatory Gehrels happened Heise HETE high-energy Huntsville images Jan van Paradijs Keck Keck telescope kilometers Klebesadel Kouveliotou Kulkarni Lamb launched Livermore look luminosity magnetar magnetic field massive star meters Milky Way galaxy mystery NASA Nature nebula neutron star nuclear observations optical afterglow optical burst optical telescope orbit photons planets possible pulsar redshift Rees rocket rotating ROTSE says sky position soft gamma repeaters solar Space Flight Center Space Telescope speed of light supernova explosion tion universe Vela satellites visible light wavelengths Wide Field Cameras Wijers Woosley X-ray source