A strange blast of radiation from space may upend how we categorise such flashes, called gamma ray bursts. It seems to come from a black hole forming surprisingly slowly after two stars merge, indicating a gap in our understanding of black holes
at Tor Vergata University of Rome. “This is telling us that there is a missing piece of the puzzle that we didn’t even know was missing.”itself, says Troja. “The black hole is like the butler in a crime movie – you know how you watch a crime movie or TV show and the first suspect is always the butler? In astronomy, it’s the black hole, because we know that it has the ability to create things that we do not understand,” says Troja.
While GRB 211211A is by far the biggest outlier from the GRB categorisations, it isn’t the only one. Other “oddball” GRBs haven’t been observed so thoroughly, though, so studying this one will help us understand the others. “I’ve been calling this the Rosetta Stone of extended-duration GRBs because it’s letting us connect the physics to the observations in much worse datasets,” says Gompertz. We may need a third category of GRBs for these weird events, the researchers say.
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