Space Travel
24, May, 2012

Newborn Black Holes Found
Written by spacetravel.org   
Wednesday, 24 August 2005 22:47
Scientists using NASA’s Swift Satellite claim they have found black holes that are only seconds old. They are consuming material falling into them, yet also propelling other material away at high speeds. Massive star explosions created these black holes. The star is obliterated by an initial blast. However, the chaotic black hole activity seems to reenergize the explosion several times in a few minutes. Professor David Burrows of Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, explains that gamma rays are followed by intense pulse rays, and the energies involved are greater than anyone had expected. Stars explode two, three and sometimes four times in the first minute following the initial explosion.

This phenomenon has been seen in nearly half of the longer gamma ray bursts detected by Swift. These gamma ray bursts, the most powerful explosions known, are forerunners of a hypernova, a star explosion that is bigger than a supernova. Until this discovery, scientists assumed that a star’s death was preceded by a single explosion, followed by the star slowly dying away. The new scenario of an explosion followed by a series of strong “hiccups” is particularly evident in GRB 050502B, a gamma ray burst from May 2, 2005, which lasted 17 seconds during the early morning hours in the constellation Leo. Swift detected a spike in X-ray light about 100 times brighter than anything ever seen about 500 seconds later.

There had previously been hints of an "X-ray bump" between the burst and afterglow in previous gamma-ray bursts, coming a minute or so after the burst.

Swift has seen over a dozen clear cases of multiple explosions. Several theories to describe this phenomenon exist; most involving the presence of a newborn black hole. Professor Peter Meszaros of Penn State, head of the Swift team, says that matter falling into the black hole release a great mass of energy, while other matter gets blasted away from the black hole and flies out into the interstellar medium. Another theory is that the jet of material shooting away from the dead star starts to fall back on itself. This creates shockwaves in the jet core that ram together blobs of gas, producing X-ray light.

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