{"id":642,"date":"2007-09-05T07:56:55","date_gmt":"2007-09-05T06:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=642"},"modified":"2007-09-05T07:56:55","modified_gmt":"2007-09-05T06:56:55","slug":"what-is-a-gamma-ray-burst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=642","title":{"rendered":"What is a gamma-ray burst?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You may not have heard of the phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB), but these things &#8211; short-lived bursts of gamma-ray photons, the most energetic form of light &#8211; are the most luminous events known in the universe since the Big Bang and they shine hundreds of times brighter than a typical supernova and about a million trillion times as bright as the sun. So they are pretty special, although they are detected once or twice per day from wholly random directions of the sky.<br \/>\nI saw a television programme recently which featured GRBs and I wanted to know more. There&#8217;s a short tutorial on the subject <a href=\"http:\/\/imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov\/docs\/science\/know_l1\/bursts.html\">here<\/a> and a short computer animation [which takes a while to load] <a href=\"http:\/\/imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov\/Videos\/news\/GRBstar2.mov\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may not have heard of the phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB), but these things &#8211; short-lived bursts of gamma-ray photons, the most energetic form of light &#8211; are the most luminous events known in the universe since the Big Bang and they shine hundreds of times brighter than a typical supernova and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}