Artist's concept of Swift Spacecraft. Image Credit/NASA
For decades, the origins of brief energetic cosmic blasts called Short Gamma Ray Bursts have puzzled the experts.
The bright flashes, which have been observed every one to two days, were first detected in the late 1960s by a class of military satellites designed to monitor potential adversaries for nuclear weapons testing.
The flashes were eventually traced to sources well beyond our galaxy. Each flash emits as much energy in a few seconds as the entire Milky Way emits in a single year, most of it in the gamma ray, or most energetic region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The latest simulations, carried out by scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, confirm suspicions the likely source for the explosions are the collisions of two neutron stars, which collapse into a black hole.
The confirmation emerged from a six week simulation of the mergers using the Damian supercomputer cluster at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany. It took that long for the powerful processors to untangle complex events that unfold over just 35 milliseconds.
The brevity of the flashes emerged as one of the biggest obstacles to identifying the source.
Swift launches on Nov. 20, 2004. Photo Credit/NASA photo
That began to change in 2004 with the launching of NASA’s Swift spacecraft. Swift was design to detect and quickly alert astronomers of the location of the flashes so they could make follow up observations.