What are the different kinds of gamma ray bursts? What powers them? What do we still have to understand about them? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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That's space and beyond. Box dot com slash Subscribe with the coupon code spaceman when you check out, this episode is also brought to you by the good people at better help. That's better. Help dot com I I know a lot of you listen to this show as a form of therapy A as a way of, of escaping the world and and just going among the stars on this wonderful journey. Uh, I am a big advocate for therapy. I personally see a therapist, and you would be surprised if you don't currently see a therapist how much they can really help you Just navigate a difficult life just like you see a doctor to help you with physical conditions, you should see a therapist Better help dot com is a way to do that. That's convenient. It's affordable. Uh, these are licensed professional counselors that you can connect to online a range of expertise worldwide. It really is an invaluable resource. Uh, as a listener, you can get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at better help dot com slash spaceman.
You can join 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health again. That's better. Help. HE LP dot com slash spaceman Listen, you don't want to mess with gamma rays. They were discovered as a part of radioactive decay, which is already bad news. Back in the early 19 hundreds, we had just discovered radioactivity. We were just discovering that there were different kinds of radioactivity. If you had a lump of something radioactive, it emitted different kinds of particles. Well, back then, in the early 19 hundreds, they didn't really use the word particle a lot. They used the word ray a lot. And so they were the Alpha Rays, the beta rays and the gamma rays. These three different kinds of Ray de I don't know if the pundits intended or not, or if they meant it.
But there it is three different kinds of rays for three different kinds of radiation, and they were labeled alpha, beta and gamma because alpha radiation was super easy to block. Alpha rays were were like nothing beta rays. You know you need a little bit of stuff to to block it or absorb it. But then gamma rays would just penetrate anything. Later on, we discovered that alpha rays are really, really atomic nuclei. Beta rays are electrons, but the gamma rays got to stay as rays. And when I say you don't want to mess with them. I really mean that gamma rays are the most penetrating form of radiation. You don't want to encounter anything described as most penetrating, especially when it's a ray associated with radioactive decay. Are you feeling me here? I mean, gamma rays are just bad news. We eventually discovered that gamma rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation.
Or once we are able to successfully bounce them off of a crystal and and do do start, they start doing things that particles don't normally do. But gamma rays are nasty gamma rays. Like most electromagnetic radiation, you can find some way to stop it. You you don't want visible light coming through the window. You close the blinds, you don't want to hear the radio. You you build a ferret, a cage, even x-rays. They can penetrate skin, but they get stopped by bone. But gamma rays, You don't tell gamma rays what to do. You don't tell them when to stop. They make that decision. They're in charge. They're the boss. Gamma rays have such short wavelengths. We're talking a million to a billion times shorter wavelength than visible light. That's the same order of magnitude difference between visible light and FM radio. So imagine just if you imagine the the energy difference the physics difference between FM radio and visible light. Now go to the other end between visible light and all the way up to gamma rays and then some.
Because gamma rays as a group include everything a million times smaller than visible light gamma rays. They have such short wavelengths that they basically act like particles, which is why it took so long for us to figure out that they were a form of electromagnetic radiation and not a part because they just act like particles. They look and act like little tiny photon bullets, right? They can smack into things. They can deflect things. There's this thing of like, You ever hear of Compton scattering? No, no, you probably haven't Compton Scattering is what happens when a gamma ray, a high energy photon, hits an electron. If you've just got an electron just sitting there minding its own business, the gamma ray will punch it, slam into it like a little bullet and send the electron flying. And all of a sudden the electron has all this energy that doesn't know what to do with. So it goes flying off. That kind of behavior is not normally associated with electromagnetic radiation with electromagnetic ration.
We think of like absorption or emission or sloshing back and forth, the electrons wiggling. No, no, no, not gamma rays. Gamma rays just. And then they're done. Compton Scattering may not sound so bad, but imagine what would happen if it hit an atom in your body. It would knock a little electron off of that atom, and now you've got an atom with some extra electro charge. Some off balance. It's a little bit ionized. It causes some issues in your body. Gamma radiation is ionizing, which means it's nasty. It's bad news. It can cause cellular damage. It can cause tissue damage. It can cause cancer most of the time. Thankfully, gamma rays, because they have such short wavelengths, just slip through normal matter. They just like you build a wall and the gamma ray just goes through. Why? Because it's so small it just slips through. All the submicroscopic cracks, like the wall, is made of air, but unfortunately, gamma rays are usually made in excessive abundance.
And so you're not just dealing with one. You're dealing with something like 10 to the bajillion. And so, yeah, most of the gamma rays will just slip on through it just fine. They'll slip in between all your little atoms and molecules. You won't even know us. But then there'll be that one, and it's bad news. So in summary, gamma rays are a associated with high energy, especially nuclear events. B, the highest energy form of radiation and C hate you. Gamma rays are bad news. Now imagine amping up the badness factor by a few orders of magnitude. Not just having a few gamma rays or some gamma rays coming off of a little pile of radioactive material. Imagine a burst a gamma ray burst a GRV. The detection of the first GRB is one of the best stories in all of astronomy. It's one of my favorite stories to tell, because the people who discovered G RBS or gamma ray burst were not astronomers in the slightest.
So check this out. It it like, uh, US develops nuclear weapons. All right. Nuclear bombs, nuclear radiation, uh, gamma rays. All connected right. You have some high energy goings on. You got some gamma rays coming out of it. The United States makes nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons go off. Gamma rays come out. Soviet Union makes some nuclear bombs. They test some nuclear bombs. Big boom, big explosion, lots of gamma rays. Everyone decides that Maybe we should take a little pause on testing the nuclear weapons after we've finished completely testing all our nuclear weapons. But everyone decides we should do it for the betterment of humanity if we sign a test ban treaty. But the United States government isn't so sure that the Soviets are going to keep up their end of the bargain. So what do they do? They develop the Vela satellites. The Vela satellites are gamma ray detectors. They're pointed at the ground. And then if the Soviets do some secret nuclear test, it's gonna make a bunch of gamma rays.
Even if it's underground, a bunch of the gamma rays are gonna get out. And then we'll see a little flash of gamma rays, and we'll say, Ha, ha. Cut your red handed, get it spread because they're communists. Never mind. Anyway, the show is off to a great start. So the Vela satellites in orbit around the earth in the 19 sixties designed to find and catch illicit secret nuclear weapons tests. They see bursts of gamma rays coming from the wrong direction. These bursts of gamma rays are coming from space. They only see a few like a dozen over the course of a few years. Finally, in 1973 they have no idea what's going on. They're like, Well, it's obviously not the Soviets unless the Soviets are in the Andromeda Galaxy testing their nuclear weapons. So I wonder if the astronomers could figure this one out. So they declassified the whole thing in 1973 and said, Hey, by the way, astronomers, um, their burst of gamma is coming from space. Have fun, as is common in astronomy. This kind of thing was named before it was understood.
This happens pretty much all the time in astronomy and is, as you know, is a favorite bone to pick in this show. GRB isn't necessarily a physical process, but it's an event that we see on our sky. It's a category of astronomical phenomena. We see a flash, a burst of gamma rays boom. It gets the label gamma ray burst, regardless of what makes it And so we're going to explore in this show. What are the things that make bursts of gamma rays? And there's a few of them. And as per usual with high energy events in astronomy, it took a long time to figure out what the heck was going on. Because high energy events are rare events, they're hard to witness. They're hard to capture. They come from very, very far away. So it took decades before we were able to get decent statistics about gamma Ray Burst. And then it was even harder to get a handle on the whole GRB scene because they just happen randomly.
And for a long time they weren't really associated with anything else going in the same region. This guy just Oh wow, look at that. It's a game. 00, it's over. They're very fast. They last a few seconds and that's it's a gamma ray burst, and then it's gone. And then that's it. There's no other sign. There's no other signature. It's not associated with anything. It's just it's like hard to classify this mysterious GRB gamma ray burst. It took until the late 19 nineties to get enough gamma ray bursts collected to realize that they came from basically every direction, which means they are extragalactic if they were confined to the Milky Way galaxy. If there was some process in our Milky Way galaxy, we would see them almost entirely in the Milky Way itself when we look in that direction, but they are coming from all over the sky, which means they had to be coming from very, very far away outside of our galaxy because there's nothing like right outside our galaxy capable of making a gamma ray burst. So these have to come from other Galaxies, and this also means that they must be extremely energetic.
A typical GRB, a typical gamma ray burst will be as bright as a star, and I know that doesn't sound like a lot. But the distance to a typical star is, you know, a few 100 maybe a couple 1000 light years. The distance to a typical GRB is something like a couple 100 million light years. In fact, I believe the nearest known GRB was 100 40 million light years away, so we're talking hundreds of millions of light years. Something happens, obviously, a big boom and it has enough energy deposited in the form of gamma rays to make it as bright as a nearby star. That is a lot of power. G RBS typically represent the most energetic and most powerful events in the entire universe at least explosions in the universe. And for a while we were wondering, Are these events uh, uniform?
Like when something blows up? Obviously, something's blowing up to make the gamma ray burst. Is it blowing up equally in all directions? Is it targeted? Is it directed Either way, if you were within, if we were within about 10,000 light years of a gamma ray burst, those gamma rays would wipe away our ozone layer. So if there was a gamma ray burst in our own galaxy or in the neighborhood of our own galaxy, it would wipe away the ozone layer, which would generally be bad news. Gamma ray bursts have been theorized to lead to some extinction events, but that doesn't seem to hold up anymore. But, man, what a way to go. All of a sudden, there's a big boom in the sky. All of a sudden, there's no ozone layer. All of a sudden, all the nasty UV radiation from the sun is just pouring in and everyone gets skin cancer and dies. That got dark real quick. Another difficulty with the G RBS with the Gara Burse is that no. Two are ever alike. They have different duration. They have different peak brightness is they have different spectra. Sometimes there's two peaks.
Sometimes they're associated with older Galaxies, sometimes with star forming Galaxies. Sometimes they're a little bit closer. Sometimes they're a little bit further. Sometimes they're more. It's just like everything. No. Two G RBS are alike, but astronomers love to categorize things, even if categorization is impossible. But they found a way to categorize GRG RBS, and they found two broad categories. G RBS tended to either be short, um, around less than two seconds or long, uh, longer than two seconds. OK, is that much? But give them a break here. They found that the short ones tended to be closer, not much closer, but but still closer than the long ones. And the short ones tended to be associated with older, redder, deader Galaxies, while the long ones tended to be associated with bright star forming Galaxies or in the spiral arms of Galaxies, which is where there's a lot of star formation.
So there is a clue here between the short G RBS and the long G RBS. The short ones tend to be closer. Redder dead Galaxies longer ones tend to be further away, tend to be brighter and more powerful and tend to be associated with star forming reaches again. It took decades for that little sentence that I just said. It took like, 40 years of research to be able to say that to give you an idea of how much energy is going into a GRB a gamma ray burst, imagine if you will converting Jupiter into pure energy, taking the entire rest mass of the planet Jupiter and converting it into 100% pure gamma rays. That is the power we are talking about in a single gamma ray burst. Before I continue, I want to let you know that this show is brought to you by the wonderful folks at brilliant dot org. Brilliant is an online stem learning platform, and it really is hands on, which is the best way to learn.
That's how I learned in undergrad, and it's It's just so much fun. I love their style. I love the way they approach things. They have two courses in particular that I think you would absolutely love. There's one on special relativity and one on gravitational physics. And how many times in this show do I say that? Really? I'm just translating the mathematics for you because math doesn't really work out so well in a podcast. And I know a lot of you want to dig deeper without actually enrolling in a university course, which would be somewhat cumbersome. And this is the perfect place to fill that gap, where you can dig deeper in an interactive, fun, engaging way and and learn some cool stuff about the universe. Head over to brilliant dot org slash spaceman to get started with a free trial and get 20% off in annual membership. That's brilliant dot org slash spaceman for 20% off unlimited access to all. The awesome course is on brilliant for a whole year. There aren't exactly a lot of super duper high powered power sources in the universe capable of converting Jupiter into energy.
Maybe it has something to do with Stars time because when stars die or stars are dead, interesting things happen. Energetic events happen like, you know, supernova. So maybe that's like the the default astronomer like you see an explosion on the sky and you wonder I wonder if that's associated with stars dying. Because how else do you get the power to disassociate Jupiter and turn it into gamma rays? The long G RBS since they are associated with star formation. But then you need a power source with stars dying. Um, maybe it's associated with big stars blowing up. You get a lot of star formation, you get some big stars, you get some small stars, the big stars in their lives and die. Maybe they power some of the long G RBS short G RBS. It's not associated with star formation, but we still want to connect it to stars. And so maybe it has to do with stellar remnants. Maybe you have a leftover like a white dwarf and a neutron star, where you've compacted a lot of material and not a lot of volume, and you've got a lot, a lot of energy to play with.
The biggest clue came when we finally started to match some G RBS to supernova. We'd see a GRB. There's your flashy gamma rays. There's Jupiter blowing up at you and then shortly after we would see a supernova or we'd look with telescopes after and we see a supernova remnant. Aha! This was the big clue. And this only happened with the long G RBS. So it really did seem and really does seem like long GR Bees are associated with stars dying. It's something to do with supernova. And we think we think that we know the origins of long GR bees. And I've already spoiled this in a previous episode, if you remember, and I really hope you do, because it is a fantastic word collapses, Ladies and gentlemen, that's right! Collapses! You thought magnetar were cool. You thought pulsar were cool. Well, what about a collapse? A collapse? Art? It's like, you know that scene in alien with the chest burs like I was like, Ah, and the alien comes out.
It just like bursts out. That's basically what's happening with a collapse are to generate gamma ray bursts. So every time you hear collapse are I want you to think of that scene from aliens and go from there. Here, here's Here's how it works. Here's how it works. Let's say you got a star, but you can't have any star because G RBS are rare. It doesn't happen with every supernova. So it has to be special conditions in order to generate a GRB. So special condition Number one. You need a really high mass star something bigger than 40 solar masses. Why? Because you need to make a black hole. Why do you need? It's a black hole. We're We're getting there. OK, don't get ahead of me. So you need a very, very large star so that when it dies in the supernova, the core collapses to make a black hole. Next special condition is the is that you need it to be rapidly spinning. Once that core forms a black hole, you now have a very awkward situation Where there's a black hole in the center, surrounded by layers and layers and layers of of leftover star.
They're just hanging out, wondering what do they do now? Well, what do they do now is they continue falling into the black hole. And if the star is spinning fast enough, it very, very quickly makes an accretion disc. The accretion disk forms around a black hole in the accretion disk. Think about this. The accretion disk is happening inside of a star surrounding a black hole, as it is in the process of undergoing a supernova explosion. So all of this is happening in like less than a second. The material forms in accretion disk accretion, disk, rapidly spinning ones, especially love to make their electric magnetic fields. Some of the material falls into the black hole says bye bye, but some of it swirls around the black hole and then shoots out in the form of jets. These high powered beams of particles, But we don't yet have a collapse are OK, we've got the alien growing inside the chest. Now comes the burster part, and the burster part requires that the outermost layers of the star have lost most of their hydrogen.
So, like the outermost layers of the atmosphere are gone. They're blown away before the supernova actually happens so that the atmosphere is a little bit thinner. And then that jet just, uh, I'd ask Kay, my editor, to add add the sound effect from the show but I think my impersonation is just fine. See if this jet punch is through. Now we have a situation, and it's a nasty one. You've got high energy particles plowing through. You've got a lot of like regular photons just hang out like the star is still glowing. It's still hot. And so maybe there's just like a normal, like infrared photon right over here, or a visible light photon over here, and the particle slams into the photon and boosts it up to being a gamma ray and then boost it in the direction of the jet. We call this, by the way, inverse Compton scattering. It's the reverse process of the Compton scattering that I talked about a little bit ago.
But that's the basic idea. This jet blasts through the atmosphere of the star, runs into any photonic can and boosts it to make a flood of gamma rays headed down the barrel. Obviously, not every star is going to make a GRB, and then, obviously, when most G RBS, we're not gonna see because everything has to be aligned along this jet. And if you're just not in the right direction, you'll see the eventual supernova, which happens like a second later. But you're not gonna see the GRB. You're not gonna see that flood of gamma rays because the gamma rays only get focused along that jet. They don't go in every direction. But if you're lucky slash unlucky, the jet will be pointed at the earth. And then when this thing, the whole thing goes off Boom. There is a freight train of gamma rays headed in one direction. And if earth happens to be in that direction, we get a gamma ray verse and we tend to get a long 11 that long lasts longer than a couple of seconds.
There are stars. You may be wondering, Do stars actually do this? Are there actually stars bigger than 40 solar masses that are rapidly spinning? They have lost a lot of their hydrogen layers. Yes. What kind of stars are those? Those are called patreon stars. It's a new classification scheme. You can check out, have more info about it. Patreon dot com slash PM Sutter let you know all about patreon stars this astronomical object. Also, while you're there, there might be an opportunity to keep the show going. I don't know it's up to you, but mostly go there to learn about patreon stars. But also, there are the wolf A stars. Wolf ray stars discovered in the mid 18 hundreds are giant stars that are rapidly spinning that have lost a lot of their layers of hydrogen. These are stars that are about to go supernova any day now. It may already have. We just don't know about it yet. And these are the stars that likely lead to gamma ray bursts because they have all the conditions necessary. That's the long ones. What about the short ones? The short gamma ray burst? Well, I've kind of spoiled that too.
Those are the killing nova. You take two neutron stars, you smash them together. What do you get? Well, in the final moments of the collision, they tear each other apart due to the extreme gravitational forces they form you, Ted, an accretion disk. The accretion disc then forms a jet and the jet powers up a gamma ray burst. Same deal, just different scale. These are gonna be shorter than the long gamma ray burst. Because two neutrons neutron stars are small. They're like the size of a city. So there isn't a lot of, uh, width to go along here. So whatever is gonna happen is gonna be over and done with a very short amount of time with the long ones. With that's that's an entire star turning itself inside out and having a chest burster event a collapse, our event. That's, you know that the stars are large. They're far larger than a city, so you got more time to do things. And so that's why we think the long ones are the supernova and the short ones are the killer. Nova.
This was finally confirmed this, and it wasn't until 2017 with that first Kan Nova observation where we saw a gamma ray burst and we saw the gravitational wave. And we saw all the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum in that same event. So we were able to figure out that it's two neutron stars merging. But as with all things in high energy astronomy, there's always something weirder around the corner. In the past couple of decades, we started spotting really long gamma ray bursts. We're talking two days, two days. That's like just think of the time scale and energy scale involved with with the long, even the long G RBS It was over and done with in a matter of a few seconds, and it was a star turning itself inside out. But now we're talking about G RBS, which we've caught a few of them which are lasting more than two days. So whatever's powering this freight train, this flood of gamma rays must be really monstrous and huge and gigantic and really, really, really good at converting matter into gamma rays.
The best thing that we can come up with, which is not confirmed this is a hypothesis is something called wonderful little name called a tidal disruption event a TDE That's right, TDES make G RBS a tidal disruption event. This is what happens when you have a supermassive black hole minding its own business. When some punk star gets close to it gets all up in its face and the black hole is like, dude back off because I'm gonna rip you apart with my extreme gravity and the stars like oh, I got I'm a star, Whatever. I'm compact, you know? And blacks like you step away Step would just I don't want to do this, all right? I don't want to be here. I don't want to cause trouble and the star gets right up in it. And the black hole says OK and then rips the star apart using tidal forces, the same tidal effect that the moon has on the Earth but cranked up to a lot. The star gets ripped apart. The star forms an accretion disk. The accretion disc powers a jet.
The jet powers a gamma ray burst. You're starting to see a common pattern here. And because the supermassive black hole is so gigantic and since it's turning the star inside out and converting it into pure energy, you get a flood of gamma rays that last a pretty long time. That's one. And at the other end, there are some really short G RBS that don't seem to match the whole kill Inova thing. The the duration, the peak, the distance it it doesn't seem to match with Kan Nova, and by the way, I forgot to mention Kan Nova are are associated with neutron stars there, which are old stellar remnants, which is why they are happening in old dead Galaxies because old dead Galaxies have a lot of neutron stars floating around. You have a lot of neutron stars floating around. They can merge together, they can be Kan Nova. You can generate the G RBS. But then there are these short, super short G RBS, which we think are associated with, of all things magnetar, which is also a kind of neutron star. But just one.
This time they're not running into anything else, but the special kind of neutron star that's super spinning, super duper magnetize. The strongest magnets in the entire universe, like 10 to to 15 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic feels something crazy like that. That's a lot of energy. That's a lot of power. That's a really, really compact thing. And the stresses on a magnetar are so intense. Magnetar have have this crust of electrons that are compressed down so tightly it it It's like rock like or like ice like electron ice and just it's like ice. If you put it under too much stress, there can be cracks, and sometimes the cracks will buckle and finally fold in on themselves to release that tension. It's like an earthquake, but on a magnetar involving electrons surrounding a neutron soup. It's like I am not making any of this up, folks. This is the real universe. Every once in a while, the magnetar can just yeah, you know, like like reset themselves and crack and reset the crack, which, as you might imagine, releases a tremendous amount of energy, which, as you might imagine, releases a tremendous amount of gammy.
So for once, a gamma ray burst mechanism that doesn't involve an accretion disk again, we're not 100% sure if this is a real deal. These very, very short gamma ray bursts in the very, very long. Gamma ray bursts are extremely rare, so we're back to where we were 50 years ago with normal G RBS, where we just haven't collected enough in order to build the statistics in the association so we can start really understanding where these things are coming from. But it's a solid guess. Collapses, magnetar, tidal disruption, events, no matter what. G RBS are associated with the most energetic events in the universe, and they're nasty thank you to at York mad on Twitter for the question that led to today's episode and thank you to all my patreon contributors. That's patreon dot com slash PM. So it really is your contributions that keep this show going. But I'd like to thank, especially my top contributors. Matthew K, Justin Z, Justin GKO, Duncan M Cody Barbara K Ne Robert M, Nate H, Andrew F Chris Cameron, NAIA Aone Tom B, Scott M, Rob H, LOL Justin Lewis M your contributions that keep the show going Keep those questions coming.
That's hashtag. Ask us spaceman on social media. Ask us spaceman at gmail dot com, or if you just need a place to go, go home and and once you're there, go to ask us. Spaceman dot com for all all the links, show notes, all episode, archive the whole deal. Places to reach out to me and ask me questions. I really do appreciate all the questions you sent me. I love it. That is how you keep this show going is by continuing to ask questions, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space