Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Watchers of the skies
- 2 Our Sun
- 3 Aspects of our Solar System
- 4 The rocky planets
- 5 The hunt for Planet X
- 6 Voyages to the outer planets
- 7 Harbingers of doom
- 8 Impact!
- 9 Four hundred years of the telescope
- 10 The family of stars
- 11 Aging stars
- 12 The search for other worlds
- 13 Are we alone? The search for life beyond the Earth
- 14 Our island Universe
- 15 Wonders of the southern sky
- 16 Proving Einstein right
- 17 Black holes: no need to be afraid
- 18 It’s about time
- 19 Hubble’s heritage: the astronomer and the telescope that honours his name
- 20 The violent Universe
- 21 The invisible Universe: dark matter and dark energy
- 22 The afterglow of creation
- 23 To infinity and beyond: a view of the cosmos
- Index
- Plate section
- References
20 - The violent Universe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Watchers of the skies
- 2 Our Sun
- 3 Aspects of our Solar System
- 4 The rocky planets
- 5 The hunt for Planet X
- 6 Voyages to the outer planets
- 7 Harbingers of doom
- 8 Impact!
- 9 Four hundred years of the telescope
- 10 The family of stars
- 11 Aging stars
- 12 The search for other worlds
- 13 Are we alone? The search for life beyond the Earth
- 14 Our island Universe
- 15 Wonders of the southern sky
- 16 Proving Einstein right
- 17 Black holes: no need to be afraid
- 18 It’s about time
- 19 Hubble’s heritage: the astronomer and the telescope that honours his name
- 20 The violent Universe
- 21 The invisible Universe: dark matter and dark energy
- 22 The afterglow of creation
- 23 To infinity and beyond: a view of the cosmos
- Index
- Plate section
- References
Summary
This chapter is going to examine the most powerful explosions in the Universe that can be observed today and also study the Big Bang origin of the Universe itself – an explosion of a very different and unique type. The story begins with the serendipitous discovery, which came out of the Cold War, of what are termed ‘gamma-ray bursts’ or GRBs.
It is an interesting point as to what ‘today’ means. We see these events now but, as we will see, they arise in galaxies in the distant reaches of the Universe and so we are seeing events that actually happened many billion of years ago.
The discovery of gamma-ray bursts
As nuclear test ban treaties were negotiated in the late 1950s, President Eisenhower’s science advisors cautioned him that the USSR might try to secretly carry out nuclear tests in space. It was decided to design and launch a series of satellites that could detect the characteristic double burst of gamma rays (very highly energetic photons) that results from a nuclear blast.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Journey through the UniverseGresham Lectures on Astronomy, pp. 285 - 300Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014