astralavista

There were no more details today from NASA on the powerful gamma ray burst reported yesterday. NASA scientists speculated that the burst was the result of a merger of two orbiting black holes or neutron stars and telegraphed the birth of a brand new black hole. However, Caltech physicist Kip Thorne has written extensively on the topic. A passage from his Black Holes and Time Warps gives an idea of what may have happened:
"The holes' inspiral [motion] is slow at first, but the closer the holes draw to each other, the faster they move, the more strongly they radiate their ripples of curvature [of spacetime], and the more rapidly they lose energy and spiral inward. Ultimately, when each hole is moving at nearly the speed of light, their horizons touch and merge. Where there were two holes, now there is one - a rapidly spinning dumbbell shaped hole. As the horizon spins, its dumbbell shape radiates ripples of curvature, and those ripples push back on the hole, gradually reducing its dumbbell protrusions until they are gone. The spinning hole's horizon is left perfectly smooth and circular in equatorial cross section...
"By examining the final, smooth black hole, one cannot in any way discover its past history. One cannot discern whether it was created by the coalescence of two smaller holes, or by the direct implosion of a star... The black hole has no 'hair' from which to decipher its history."
This account spells trouble for astronomers trying to decipher what happened on May 9. They will have to pore over old photographs of the cosmic region and look for traces of black holes or neutron stars. The new bald black hole won't give up any clues. One great source of evidence would be gravitational waves. Unfortunatelly, LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, which still pretty much in debugging mode, has nothing to report.