Gravitational Radiation, Luminous Black Holes and Gamma-Ray Burst Supernovae

Book Description

Black holes and gravitational radiation are two of the most dramatic predictions of general relativity. The quest for rotating black holes - discovered by Roy P. Kerr as exact solutions to the Einstein equations - is one of the most exciting challenges currently facing physicists and astronomers. Gravitational Radiation, Luminous Black Holes and Gamma-Ray Burst Supernovae takes the reader through the theory of gravitational radiation and rotating black holes, and the phenomenology of GRB-supernovae. Topics covered include Kerr black holes and the frame-dragging of spacetime, luminous black holes, compact tori around black holes, and black-hole spin interactions. It concludes with a discussion of prospects for gravitational-wave detections of a long-duration burst in gravitational-waves as a method of choice for identifying Kerr black holes in the Universe. This book is ideal for a special topics graduate course on gravitational-wave astronomy and as an introduction to those interested in this contemporary development in physics.

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Unlocking one of the great unsolved mysteries in the Universe: how the first stars were made at the very dawn of time........2006-08-09

Out in deepest space lurks a force of almost unimaginable power. Explosions of extraordinary violence, are blasting through the Universe every day. If one ever struck our Solar System it would destroy our Sun and all the planets. For years no one could work out what was causing these awesome explosions. Now Maurice van Putten and other elite scientists think they have identified the culprit. It's the most extreme object ever found in the Universe; they have christened it a 'hypernova'. For decades scientists were baffled. Especially disturbing was evidence that these explosions might be coming from the furthest reaches of the Universe, billions of light years away. If this was so, then for us to see them on Earth they had to be on a scale that was beyond our comprehension. According to some, these explosions were so huge that they might even violate the most sacred law in all science: Einstein's famous equation relating mass and energy, E=mc². That law underpins nothing less than our understanding of how our Universe works.

It was not until 1997, when a satellite pinpointed the exact location of these bursts, that scientists began to solve the puzzle. It seems these huge explosions are caused by the death throws of stars twenty times the size of our Sun, which burn themselves out and explode, creating hypernovae. What then unfolded was a chain of events, which would ultimately point towards some of the most exotic wonders in the Universe: stellar nurseries (where new stars are born) and black holes. Observations show that--instead of fading away, as an explosion might be expected to--radiation continues to emerge from the area of a hypernova. This ongoing emission is characteristic of the process of star birth. Astronomers conclude that the hypernova grows rapidly along with other normal stars in a nursery, but burns out when its contemporaries are still in their infancy. Find a hypernova, and you have also tracked down a part of space where stellar synthesis is underway.

Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursters (Lecture Notes Series)

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Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursters (Lecture Notes Series)
Kurt Ed. Weiler
Manufacturer: Springer-Verlag
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ASIN: 3540440534

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Written by an international team of experts, this set of tutorial reviews provides a coherent and accessible summary of the current state of supernova research in all of its facets. The newly detected gamma-ray bursts are discussed in this context. While primarily addressing astrophysicists and astronomers, this book will also be of interest to cosmologists and nuclear physicists working on supernova-related issues.

The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts, the Most Violent Explosions in the Universe

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An educational and insightful peek into the research on Gamma-Ray Bursts
Whiny
Gamma-ray bursts!
Written too Soon?
Science is Done by People

The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts, the Most Violent Explosions in the Universe
Jonathan I. Katz
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0195145704

Book Description

For over a quarter of a century, gamma-ray bursts were the outstanding mystery in astronomy. No one knew where they were or how they worked. The Biggest Bangs tells how the mystery was unraveled, from the discovery of gamma-ray bursts by a Cold War satellite system monitoring the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to the localization of bursts in distant galaxies and the observation of surprisingly bright flashes of light from the bursts themselves. The Biggest Bangs is for laymen with an interest in science, physicists and astronomers interested in subjects in those fields not their specialty, students in non-technical astonomy courses, and as supplemental reading for courses in the history of science.

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An educational and insightful peek into the research on Gamma-Ray Bursts .......2007-08-20

In this book, Dr. Katz (a professor of Physics) takes the reader on an educational and insightful trip into the history of research on the phenomena of Gamma-Ray Bursts ... bursts of highly energetic photons with energies far in excess of standard X-Rays - sometimes hundreds (even thousands) of times more powerful.

The journey of discovery goes all the way back to the early days of the Cold War, and fledgeling attempts to monitor international compliance to the nuclear test ban treaty ... and from there into the early days of the space program ... and on into the days of the Hubble Space Telescopes, the BATSE/GRO (Gamma Ray Observatory), HETE-2 (High-Energy Transient Explorer), and on into attempts to scatter GROs far and wide throughout the solar system, in order to use triangulation and parallax to pinpoint the location and distance of such bursts ... with the holy grail being to someday localize such a burst quickly enough to focus a telescope on the origin, and settle the ongoing (and heated) debates concerning the nature (and distance) of their origin.

The author does an excellent job of taking the reader along on a thrilling ride of discovery - not just of the phenomena at hand, but also on a lifecycle of the scientific method itself ... from the early stages of gamma burst detection, through early theoretical explanations, through increasingly complex experiments attempting better measurements, through setbacks of funding and accidents during and after launch, to revised theories and debates in response, to still more ambitious experiments by forward thinking and innovative minds ... and finally onward to the holy grail itself - timely photos of the afterglow of a super burst, and the long sought-after confirmation of the origin and nature of such bursts - a holy grail that, in this case, is found and described by the author in his closing chapter

The book is recommended, albeit with one minor stylistic nit ... the author has this inexplicable aversion to using superlatives when he writes about his subject. This causes him, at times, to project an overly-cool detachment, when describing mind-bogglingly powerful phenomena (on the order to 10**54 ergs) ... it left me feeling half-crazed at times, wishing I could shake him.

Anyway, if you like populist {astro}physicists-turned-authors like Brian Greene, you'll like Dr. Katz, and this book as well.

Whiny.......2006-08-28

I have to agree with a previous review, this book is so whiny of the lack of research in gamma-ray bursts that I forgot I was reading a science book.

Gamma-ray bursts!.......2004-12-03

Gamma-ray bursters were first detected in 1967, by satellites designed to verify complaince with rules against testing of nuclear weapons. This book traces the history of figuring out what produced the gamma-ray bursts and tells what we know about them.

The first question was: were they near us or far from us? That got answered more than ten years ago: they're far away. Besides the gamma-ray bursters, there were other objects, "soft gamma repeaters." We learn how all these phenomena started to become associated with faraway neutron stars. The soft gamma repeaters were interpreted either as a release of magnetic energy by the neutron star or as the sudden accretion of matter by the neutron star. And the gamma-ray bursters were interpreted as the, um, collision of binary neutron stars. Actually, I think there is good evidence for some gamma-ray bursters being collapsars rather than merging binary neutron stars, and I wish there had been a better discussion of all this. In addition, I would have liked to see more about the difference between the shorter and longer gamma-ray bursts.

In any case, we're led to a couple of obvious questions: just how big are these bursts? And how much damage would one do if it occurred in our galaxy? Well, they can dish out up to 10 to the 52 ergs per second. And they do that for about a minute. For reference, our Sun puts out about 4 times 10 to the 33 ergs per second. So for a minute, the gamma-ray burster is more than 10 to the 18 times as luminous as the Sun. Over a hundred thousand times as luminous as the entire Milky Way galaxy! That's scary. If a star 5 light years from us were to become a gamma-ray burster, the blast would hit us like an atom bomb going off less than 10 feet away. We'd be vaporized.

Still, gamma-ray bursters are rather infrequent. We might do better if the burster were, say, 500 light years away. Still, that would pretty much set half the planet on fire, not a very pleasant prospect.

Supernovae are about 10,000 times more frequent than gamma-ray bursters. But Katz explains that gamma-ray bursters may be more dangerous to us than supernovae. After all, we might well survive a supernova blast at a distance of 20 light years.

The good news the author gives us is that we might be able to predict when a gamma-ray burst would occur. He speculates that we might even know the time to the minute (assuming the merging binary neutron star theory is correct and we can make use of it), and know it years in advance. If that burst were a thousand light years away, what would we do? Most of us would get to the side of the Earth away from the blast, and that would protect us. And a few brave firemen would water down half the planet and hide out underground, and then try to put out all the fires! I've no idea what we'd do about all the induced radioactivity. Sounds like a marvellous science fiction story.

Anyway, I liked the book. I don't know why there isn't more popular interest in these fascinating gamma-ray bursts.

Written too Soon?.......2003-05-13

In the late 1960s the U.S. military discovered gamma-ray bursts: intense bursts of radiation coming from random points in the sky. Over the next thirty years these bursts remained one of the most mysterious astrophysical phenomena. Very little was known about them. This changed in 1997 when Paul Vreeswijk discovered an optical flash at the location of one gamma-ray burst. This discovery made it possible to determine that gamma-ray bursts are at cosmological distances and involve energies that are usually only seen in exploding stars. Jonathan Katz gives the history of gamma-ray bursts and provides a clear explaination of how astronomers have come to understand what they are and how they work. Unfortunately most of the book is devoted to what happened before 1997. Only four of the seventeen chapters cover the time after the discovery of the optical flashes. This is unfortunate because it has been since 1997 that science has been able to understand gamma-ray bursts. The book would have been much better if it had treated the two eras equally instead of concentrating on the early history of the field. The book also suffers from a slighly biased view of who contributed what to our understanding of gamma-ray bursts. The field is competetive, and rival researchers often refuse to give credit where credit is due. It is unfortunate that Katz chooses to continue this trend in a popular work. Gamma-ray bursts are a hot topic in astronomy, and the story of their discovery is worth telling. However, "The Biggest Bangs" is not that story.

Science is Done by People.......2002-10-02

The Biggest Bangs is really two books in one. The first book is an entertaining popular account of astronomical gamma-ray bursts. It tells how they were accidentally discovered (by satellites launched to monitor the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty), how (through the development of better instruments) we gradually learned more about them, how the right ideas were sifted from the wrong ideas (there were plenty of wrong ideas), and how astronomers finally arrived at their present understanding. The picture is still rather cloudy, so there are likely many surprises yet to come. This is straightforward popular science writing, uncontroversial and rather well done.

The second book hiding inside The Biggest Bangs is an account of the human side of science, warts and all. This is reminiscent of The Double Helix (although Katz is only one of many contributors to understanding gamma-ray bursts, and his own name doesn't even appear in his index, in contrast to The Double Helix, in which Watson was the biggest player as well as the author). In both books the human side is often ugly. Good ideas are rejected for funding, scientists can be real backstabbers (they're human beings with the usual share of jealousy and more than the usual share of ambition), and credit doesn't always go to the most deserving (the Soviet contributors seem to have received particularly short shrift). NASA comes in for severe criticism (well-deserved, according to most scientists who have dealt with that agency). NASA apparatchiks and people who believe that science is a never-never land populated by goody-goodies above mere human failings have not been pleased.

Book Description

In this tour de force of the ultimate and extreme in astrophysics, renowned astrophysicist and author J. Craig Wheeler takes us on a breathtaking journey to supernovae, black holes, gamma-ray bursts and adventures in hyperspace. This is no far-fetched science fiction tale, but an enthusiastic exploration of ideas at the cutting edge of current astrophysics. Wheeler follows the tortuous life of a star from birth to evolution and death, and goes on to consider the complete collapse of a star into a black hole, worm-hole time machines, the possible birth of baby bubble universes, and the prospect of a revolutionary view of space and time in a ten-dimensional string theory. Along the way he offers evidence that suggests the Universe is accelerating and describes recent developments in understanding gamma-ray bursts--perhaps the most catastrophic cosmic events of all. With the use of lucid analogies, simple language and crystal-clear cartoons, Cosmic Catastrophes makes accessible some of the most exciting and mind-bending objects and ideas in the Universe. J. Craig Wheeler is currently Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin and Vice President of the American Astronomical Society as of 1999.

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Excellent book.......2007-07-22

This book probably has some of the best descriptions for novae and supernovae, that I have seen, for non-scientists.

Cosmic catastrophies by J. Craig Wheeler.......2005-08-28

Highly recommended for the cosmically curious who does not have the mathmatical background. It is easy to understand and well written.

How stars work.......2001-02-26

I found this book a complete surprise. From the title, I expected only a story about explosions and collisions but this book is much, much more. It provides really brilliant descriptions of how all kinds of stars evolve and how they regulate their energy production. After reading this book I fully understood why aging stars produce more energy but are cooler than they were in their youth. A minor complaint might be that the content is not well organized. A type 1A supernova is explained here and a type 2 there and later some more about 1A etc. But, I shouldn't dwell on a quibble. This is a terrific book. After reading it I'll never think of iron or nickel in quite the same way again.

The biggest explosions.......2000-10-06

There seems to be an aspect of human nature that wants to search out and discover things that are the most extreme in their class. People just seem to love record setters. This is a book about cosmic record setters. Within its pages Wheeler describes the biggest, most energetic, oldest, densest, things in the universe. If cosmic record holders hold any interest for you, then I think you'll find this book as enjoyable as I did.

Wheeler begins his book by describing how stars form, how they evolve in response to gravity, how they ignite, how they burn, and eventually how they die. This is a logical introduction, since virtually all the examples of cosmic catastrophes involve stars in one form or another. Like people, though, the life of each star is unique - and the end times are very different. Wheeler does an excellent job of describing the negative feedback process that stabilizes solar activity. If the star generates too much heat it expands. This expansion reduces the temperature, and throttles back on the rate of nuclear fusion. If the star cools down it contracts, and the contraction heats it up again, keeping the rate of fusion at a remarkably constant level for long periods of time during the stars life.

Much of Wheeler's text is actually about how stars evolve. This is important because to understand their deaths, you need to understand how they are born and how they evolve over their lifetimes. Their deaths are frequently the most interesting parts of the story because they are often involved with the catastrophes that are the book's principal thesis. While I bought the book because of its discussion about cosmic catastrophes, I found it valuable for its descriptions of stellar evolution alone. This includes a nice description of the "solar-neutrino" problem as well as a nice explanation of the red-giant phase, and especially the last stages during the life of a massive star that explodes in a super nova.

The foundational understanding of the basics of stellar evolution makes it easier to follower Wheeler as he takes the reader on a tour of the major players in cosmic catastrophes: white dwarfs, super novae (of many different types), neutron stars, black holes, and gamma-ray bursts. Wheeler's descriptions of these phenomena (to the extent that modern science understands them) are among the best I've seen in a popular science textbook. There is also a smattering of discussion about the origin of the universe in the Big Bang, and some interesting speculation about time (and space) travel using black holes.

In any book dealing with modern cosmology and astronomy there are inevitable discussions about the nature of space and time and how they fit together with Einstein's theory of general relativity. Most such books have at least one figure showing a funnel-shaped construct with grid lines converging as they swoop into the tapering end where the black hole resides. Wheeler uses lots of such diagrams. However, I think he does a better job than most at helping the reader understand what the diagrams illustrate. More importantly, he helps the reader understand what the diagrams do not illustrate, and their limitations (he dispels some common misperceptions about these sorts of figures). I especially enjoyed Wheeler's explanations about how one might (with the application of the appropriate mental acrobatics) use the diagrams to actually envision what is really going on in our multi-dimensional world.

Another thing I liked about Wheeler's book is the clear and frequent illustrations. For the most part the author has anticipated those places where prose just cannot quite complete the mental picture. When this happens there is inevitably a well-constructed diagram that finishes the concept and makes things clear. There was one exception, however. Figure 7.3 really needs to have an arrow or circle marking the location of SN 1987A. [I'm pretty sure I found it, but the exposure changes between the photographs, and so I'm not quite sure. It would have been nice to have the author's help in preventing a false identification.]

Reading this book one gets the sense that even though it is a qualitative description of astronomy (there are no equations) Wheeler is not over simplifying. His discussion of super novae, for example, lists many classes and describes theoretical uncertainties that other authors gloss over or ignore all together. Of course there is much more detail to super novae than what is in Wheeler's book. But at the qualitative level Wheeler leaves the reader understanding that there are many classifications of super novae, that some of the boundaries between classifications are not always so clear cut, and that we still don't know a lot about how some types form, and how other types explode. These are concepts that other popular science textbooks don't always convey. I think the only thing missing from the chapters on super novae is a table that summarizes all the different types and some of their descriptive identifiers.

Unlike some popular science texts, Wheeler devotes quite a bit of time describing the evolution of binary stars, which play an important role in some of the greatest cosmic catastrophes. I think he does an especially good job of qualitatively describing accretion disks, and how they fit in the context of mass transfer in binary systems. It's this mass transfer that is ultimately involved in some of the most spectacular catastrophes in the sky.

Book Description

Recent observations have demonstrated that supernovae and gamma ray bursts are driven by strong jets of energy and other asymmetrical effects that reveal unknown physical properties. This volume highlights the burgeoning era of routine supernova polarimetry and the new insights into core collapse and thermonuclear explosions. Chapters by leading scientists summarize the status of a rapidly developing perspective on stellar explosions in a valuable resource for graduate students and research scientists.

Cosmic Explosions (SPRINGER PROCEEDINGS IN PHYSICS)

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Cosmic Explosions (SPRINGER PROCEEDINGS IN PHYSICS)
J. M., Ed. Marcaide
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3540230394

Book Description

The proceedings of the conference Supernovae 2003 (IAU colloquium 192) provides an extensive state-of-the-art survey of all theoretical and observational aspects of supernovae and gamma-ray bursts, as well as their impact on cosmology. This volume offers everyone working in this field an authoritative and comprehensive source of reference. The present volume includes a CD-ROM with the printed proceedings plus poster descriptions and meeting photographs not printed in the book.

Cosmic Explosions: Tenth Astrophysics Conference College Park, Maryland, USA, 11-13 October 1999 (AIP Conference Proceedings / Astronomy and Astrophysics)

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Cosmic Explosions: Tenth Astrophysics Conference College Park, Maryland, USA, 11-13 October 1999 (AIP Conference Proceedings / Astronomy and Astrophysics)

Manufacturer: American Institute of Physics
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Book Description

This conference presents invited and contributed papers by international experts devoted to explosive phenomena in cosmic settings as diverse as stellar flares, X-ray bursts, jets, novae, supernovae, hypernovae, and gamma-ray bursts. The conference considered not only the origins of explosive behavior, but also information about the host systems that the explosive phenomena might yield. For example, X-ray bursts can be used to determine structural parameters of neutron stars, and specific types of supernovae can be used as standard candles to study the deceleration of the Hubble expansion.

Gamma-Ray Bursts (Springer Praxis Books / Astronomy and Planetary Sciences)

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Gamma-Ray Bursts (Springer Praxis Books / Astronomy and Planetary Sciences)
Gilbert Vedrenne , and Jean-Luc Atteia
Manufacturer: Springer
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Book Description

Since their discovery was first announced in 1973, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been among the most fascination objects in the universe. While the initial mystery has gone, the fascination continues, sustained by the close connection linking GRBs with some of the most fundamental topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology. Both authors have been active in GRB observations for over two decades and have produced an outstanding account on both the history and the perspectives of GRB research.

Interacting Binaries: Accretion, Evolution, Outcomes Cefalu, Sicily 4-10-July 2004 (AIP Conference Proceedings)

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Interacting Binaries: Accretion, Evolution, Outcomes Cefalu, Sicily 4-10-July 2004 (AIP Conference Proceedings)
Burderi L
Manufacturer: Springer
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ASIN: 0735402868

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This conference examines the progress in the field of interacting binaries discussing a number of relevant astrophysical problems regarding the interaction between stars in binary systems, such as the physics of neutron stars and black holes that accrete matter from their companion stars and the study of the end points of stellar evolution, like supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. This proceedings provides an updated overview of both observations and theory. Topics include: compact binaries in globular clusters, millisecond binary pulsars, supernovae from massive binary systems and GRBs, accretion on black holes and microquasars, accretion on white dwarfs and novae, rapid variability and secular evolution of LMX-Ray binaries, supernovae type Ia, as well as secular evolution of high-mass x-ray binaries.

The Multicolored Landscape of Compact Objects and Their Explosive Origins: Cefalu 2006 (AIP Conference Proceedings / Astronomy and Astrophysics) (AIP Conference ... Proceedings / Astronomy and Astrophysics)

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The Multicolored Landscape of Compact Objects and Their Explosive Origins: Cefalu 2006 (AIP Conference Proceedings / Astronomy and Astrophysics) (AIP Conference ... Proceedings / Astronomy and Astrophysics)

Manufacturer: American Institute of Physics
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Information published in these Proceedings books will be useful for researcher working in Astronomy and Astrophysics, mainly in the field of observational and theoretical studies of compact objects (such as super-massive and stellar mass black holes, highly and weakly magnetized neutron stars, and white dwarfs, isolated or in binary systems, Galactic or extra-galactic) and their progenitors or end points (such as Supernovae and Gamma-ray Bursts).

All papers have been peer-reviewed. These two Proceedings books contain the scientific discussions that more than one hundred scientists from all over the world have had during a two-weeks conference held in Cefalù (in the beautiful island of Sicily, Italy) from 11 to 24 June 2006. Oral contributions and posters were presented at the conference dealing with the astrophysics of compact objects, such as super-massive and stellar mass black holes, highly and weakly magnetized neutron stars, and white dwarfs, both isolated and in binary systems, and of their progenitors or end-points, such as Supernovae and Gamma Ray Bursts. In particular the meeting (and the following Proceedings books) are focused on several scientific areas that are briefly described in the following.

The first volume starts with the discussion of the so-called GAMMA RAY BURSTS (GRBs), which are among the most violent explosions in the Universe, most probably related to the final stages of the life of a massive star and the formation of a black hole, or to the coalescence of two neutron stars in a close binary system. In particular we discuss the globalproperties of long and short GRBs and of their Afterglows, the relation between GRBs and Cosmology, the connection to particular types of Supernovae, as well as present and future instrumentation. Then we discuss the so-called MAGNETAR CANDIDATES, which are neutron stars with very large magnetic fields (above 10^13 Gauss) showing coherent X-ray pulsations. These are usually observed as Anomalous X-ray Pulsars or Soft Gamma Repeaters. This last class of objects show sometimes very powerful soft gamma-ray outbursts from which a connection to the GRBs phenomenon has been proposed. The first volume ends with the discussion of the properties of SUPERNOVAE, which are connected tothe GRBs and are often the progenitors of collapsed objects.

In the second volume of the Proceedings we discuss the properties of PULSARS and millisecond pulsars. In particular, an update of the recently discovered double neutron star system is presented, were it is shown that with this system the theory of General Relativity has been tested with a precision of 0.05%, becoming the most precise physical theory to date. The discussion continues with the observational and theoretical properties of INTERACTING BINARIES containing white dwarfs, neutron stars or black hole candidates.

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