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Based on data coming out of NASA today, the agency's Swift gamma ray observatory has seen for the first time the birth of a black hole. The Swift registered a short and extremely powerful burst of gamma rays on May 9. NASA scientists speculate that the explosion was caused by a collision of two older low-mass black holes or two neutron stars.
Gamma bursts are the most violent events in the universe. NASA said that the burst, numbered grb050509b, "appears to have occurred near a galaxy that has old stars and is relatively nearby, about 2.7 billion light years away from Earth. This is consistent with the theory that short bursts come from older, evolved neutron stars and black holes. In contrast, longer gamma-ray bursts tend to be in young, distant galaxies filled with young, massive stars, remnants of the early universe."
"We are combing the region around the burst with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii for clues about this burst or its host galaxy," said Shri Kulkarni, a gamma-ray burst expert from the California Institute of Technology.
The system's image comes from Joshua Bloom, gamma-ray researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.