Saturday, 19 September 2009

Cosmic Flashes Caused By Black Holes

Black holes are invading stars, providing a radical explanation to bright flashes in the universe that are one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy today.The flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are beams of high energy radiation –" similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons –" produced by jets of plasma from massive dying stars.The orthodox model for this cosmic jet engine involves plasma being heated by neutrinos in a disk of matter that forms around a black hole, which is created when a star collapses.But mathematicians at the University of Leeds have come up with a different explanation: the jets come directly from black holes, which can dive into nearby massive stars and devour them.Their theory is based on recent observations by the Swift satellite which indicates that the central jet engine operates for up to 10,000 seconds - much longer than the neutrino model can explain.Mathematicians believe that this is evidence for an electromagnetic origin of the jets, i.e.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1755571/cosmic_flashes_caused_by_black_holes/index.html?source=r_space

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