"Burning Walls" May Stop Black Hole Formation 100
KentuckyFC writes "Black holes are thought to form when a star greater than 4 times the mass of the Sun explodes in a supernova and then collapses. The force of this collapse is so great that no known force can stop it. In less massive stars, the collapse cannot overcome so-called neutron degeneracy, the force that stops neutrons from being squashed together. Now a Russian physicist says another effect may be involved. He points out that quantum chromodynamics predicts that when neutrons are squashed together, matter undergoes a phase transition into "subhadronic" matter. This is very different from ordinary matter. In subhadronic form, space is essentially empty. So the phase change creates a sudden reduction in pressure, forcing any ordinary matter in the star to implode into this new vacuum. The result is a massive increase in temperature of this matter that creates a "burning wall" within the supernova. And it is this burning wall that stops the formation of a black hole, not just the degeneracy pressure of neutrons. This should lead to much greater energies inside a supernova than had been thought possible until now. And that's important because it could explain the formation of high energy gamma ray bursts that have long puzzled astrophysicists."
Re:I love this kind of story (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was an undergrad, I worked on CASA, the Chicago Air Shower Array. It was a big array of detectors in the Utah desert, designed to identify point souces of ultra-high energy gamma ray bursts and get more information about the showers of particles they create when they hit the atmosphere.
It's nice to see a model that could conceivably give an idea of how gamma ray bursts happen. In 1988-89, there really weren't any very good candidates. The problem was interesting enough to get James Cronin, who had won a Nobel Prize with Val Fitch for their discovery of a certain kind of symmetry violation in particle physics, interested in experimental astrophysics. He was one of the principal scientists on the project. And he even did some manual labor, like helping with wrapping detectors. I remember him eating the lunch he had brought from home and talking to me about the health benefits of garlic as we worked on preparing detectors one day.
Each box had four detectors in it, each detector made of a piece of scintillator with a big photomultiplier attached, all wrapped in black to make it light-tight. In addition to an identifying number, the grad students gave each box a name. Some were named for blues musicians, for example. At some point, the undergrads working on the project started expressing creativity by using made-up names to sign the detectors we had prepared and tested. To this day I wonder if Cronin ever saw the one I had signed as "Cronan the Barbarian."
Re:I love this kind of story (Score:3, Interesting)
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.