I went to a talk at the CMS by Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute: http://www.talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/64415 He attributed the most probable explanation to the gravitational waves exciting a nearby dust cloud, causing it to resonate gamma rays. This is consistent with it being several orders of magnitude weaker than the gravitational source. Best wishes, Adam P. Goucher
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2016 at 5:14 PM From: "Warren D Smith" <warren.wds@gmail.com> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Subject: [math-fun] black hole merger accompanied by gamma ray burst ??!!
Fermi satellite reports that starting 0.4 seconds after the 0.1-second-long black hole merger detected by LIGO, a burst of 10-10000 KeV gamma rays lasting 1 second happened. It is thought to have come from very roughly the same part of the sky. If it came from the same source, then its energy was about 5 earth masses converted into gamma photon energy. The black hole merger released about 3 solar masses of graviton energy. But another satellite failed to detect the gamma burst. http://gammaray.nsstc.nasa.gov/gbm/publications/preprints/gbm_ligo_preprint....
If the two holes had been orbiting for aeons they should be pure vacuum and incapable of producing any high energy (or even moderate energy) photons.
If there was (say) a jupiter orbiting one of the holes, one would not expect it to get swallowed in 1 second, it would have happened at least about 1 day later, I'd think. Abraham Loeb proposed both holes were created inside the same huge star (evidently over 61 solar masses) then spiralled into each other soon after creation. Other matter in the star got heated and glowed in gamma rays for 1 sec before shutoff because everything got swallowed. His proposal is here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04735 This seems dubious to me. Wouldn't the outside of the star block the gamma rays for longer than 1 second? Wouldn't it not even know until a speed-of-sound delay later? Why would two holes form inside a star in a huge departure from spherical symmetry? That's one hell of a big star, do stars of such high masses even exist that are ready to collapse? (And it would need to be rotating very rapidly, even stranger.) Certainly if they do exist, they are very rare.
But, it is hard to think of any competing explanation. Maybe the answer is this all was just a huge coincidence and the two signals are unrelated. The INTEGRAL satellite team has published saying their satellite says there was no gamma burst, at keast in their 75-2000 KeV range, suggesting it all was bullshit: http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04180
-- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
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