Sci-Fi Today previously ran a story on the topic of gamma ray bursts, which are the most powerful explosions known. These come in two flavors, chocolate and vanilla … er, wrong story, long and short. The long ones last up to 1000 seconds and are now thought to come from supernovas. The short ones can last less than a second and are now thought to be from the collision of two neutron stars. Now it turns out that no matter how you make it, a gamma ray burst ends up as the same thing – a black hole. “It is suspected that, either way, with each gamma-ray burst we wind up with a brand new black hole,” said Penn State’s Peter Meszaros. “The puzzle is in trying to identify clues that would help to elucidate whether these two types consist of essentially the same objects with different behaviors, or different objects with somewhat similar behavior.”
Soon a new observatory may be able to make simultaneous observations with a pair of neutron stars merging, measuring not the gamma ray flash of such an event, but the ripples created in spacetime itself when the resulting black hole forms – so called gravity waves. That new observatory is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).