On Earth we seem insulated from the violence of the cosmos. Though there is
drama a-plenty in the lives of stars and galaxies, the timescales are so long
that from here they seem peaceful and unchanging. But there are some cosmic
happenings that, should you see them, would take your breath away. About once a
day, for no more than a few seconds, the sky is blasted with a huge burst of
radiation. “I call them God’s firecrackers,” says leading theorist Stan Woosely
of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Invisible to the naked eye, these
gamma ray bursts (GRBs) come from incredibly rapid explosions of almost
unimaginable violence. By some estimates, they radiate more energy in a few
seconds than the Sun does in 10 billion years.
Telescopes and satellites have been picking up these dramatic fireworks for
25 years. And yet in all that time their nature and origin have remained a
mystery. Some astronomers believe they come from within our Galaxy while others
hold that they are from the farthest reaches of the Universe. Now, at last, we
should find out. On 28 February, an Italian-Dutch satellite called BeppoSAX
detected a burst that took the astronomical community by storm. And just three
weeks ago, another burst happened which could finally crack the problem.
Observers around the world are scrambling for their telescopes and theorists are
hastily revising their models to try to explain the data. “It’s terrifically
exciting,” says Woosely. “This seems to be the breakthrough that we’ve been
waiting for.”
GRBs were first spotted in the 1960s by American satellites on the lookout
for clandestine…
