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Short Sharp Science: A New Scientist blog

Anatomy of a short gamma ray burst

Seil Collins, reporter

(Image: ASA/AEI/ZIB/M.Koppitz and L.Rezzolla)

A supercomputer has revealed the process behind the formation of short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in gory detail.

GRBs are some of the brightest events in the universe. The most common type lasts over 2 seconds and the process behind their formation is generally well understood: the collapse of a massive star into a black hole triggers the formation of jets, which bore through the collapsing star, producing gamma rays as they emerge.

Short GRBs last less than 2 seconds, and the exact nature of the forces behind their formation has proven difficult to understand. The leading model was based on the merger of two neutron stars.

The new simulation ran for nearly seven weeks on the Damiana computer cluster at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany and follows the events as they unfold over 35 milliseconds.

The first 15 milliseconds show two neutron stars crashing and transforming into a rapidly spinning black hole. Over the next 11 milliseconds, the swirling matter around the black hole amplifies the strength of the two stars' combined magnetic field. The field gradually becomes more organised and forms two outwardly directed funnels along the black hole's rotational axis. This final phase of the sequence is exactly the configuration needed to power a jet of ultrafast particles that produce short GRBs.

"Only now can we show that the merger of neutron stars actually produces an ultra-strong magnetic field structured like the jets needed for a GRB," says Bruno Giacomazzo of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who helped create the simulation.

Chryssa Kouveliotou, a team member at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, says "this is by far the longest simulation of this process".
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Wait... is the article saying the researchers required 7 weeks of processing time to render the simulation? How far we've come from GOSUB.


I don't understand one thing: what produce magnetic field inside of black hole. How black hole can have magnetic field? There is another question: if gravitational field spreading with speed of light (gravitational waves) how it can escape black hole?


Recently, there was an article that stated that black holes cannot exist, since the process of creating one (during a super nova) comes to a halt as the time goes slower and slower when it's radius approaches that of the event horizon. So it takes infinite time to create a black hole.

So it's just a waste of time speculating about black holes. And because of that, we can forget all about Hawking radiation too. It's sad, isn't it?



The magnetic field isn't produced inside the black hole, it is created by the (rotating) matter around the black hole.

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