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Re: Mutiny on the Meteorite list

At 02:31 PM 5/7/98 -0400, you wrote:
>OK.   I've had it.  I'm dying to know what the various members have to
>say about the information captured by the Hubble telescope that was
>released yesterday.  If we need a correlation, aren't interstellar
>grains formed by such a cataclysmic event?    What are you all
>thinking?  Anyone?
>
>Curiously,
>Julia
>
There used to be an astrophysics elist which would have been to perfect
place for this, but it got taken down a few months ago...

The thing is called a Gamma Ray Burster. They were first seen about thirty
years ago, when satellites were launched (as part of the nuclear test ban
treaty) to watch for nuclear explosions. They started picking these things
up at a rate of about one per day. In a recent issue of Sky and Telescope
Magazine (three or four months ago), there was an article about gamma ray
bursters (the title was "Gamma Ray Bursters of Doom"), which did a good job
of covering current knowledge of these things. 

The leading model says that they are probably the result of two neutron
stars crashing into one another to produce a black hole. Great gobs of
energy gets released in gamma rays, x-rays, gravitations waves, etc. The
title of the article comes from the fact that if one of these things happen
within a few thousand light years or so, we here on Earth are toast. (I
don't remember the exact distance, but it was a lot higher than I expected).

The amazing thing about this particular event is that the amount of energy
released (it outshown the ENTIRE VISIBLE UNIVERSE for a few seconds or
minutes) is at the high upper end of what the theory postulates. If they
find anything much more energetic, current physics can't explain it. And I
would expect if there was any life in that galaxy when the explosion
occured, it was probably wiped out.
Sort of puts rogue asteroids in their place, don't it.

Mark Abbott
Printware, Inc.
1270 Eagan Industrial Road
Eagan, MN  55121
Phone:  (612) 456-1473
E-mail: mra@printwareinc.com