Looking down the barrel
Now, what kind of supernova could blast itself so forcefully that the echoes in gamma rays could reach Earth with the measured intensity?
The answer to this had to wait for detection and analysis of several more events in subsequent years.
A gamma ray gun
Refinements in instrumentation and the timely accumulation of ever better data has provided new pieces whereby a certain consensus has at last been arrived for solving the puzzle.
There is a class of very energetic supernovas classified as type 1c, a star that blows itself to oblivion leaving behind a black hole once the capture of matter from a bloated companion exceeds a certain critical mass.
In the fleeting instants before the newly born black hole globs nearby spinning matter, a symmetric pair of atomic particle jets squirts from the poles along the rotational axis.
These jets are composed of protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles accelerated at nearly light speed, and usually crash immediately with clouds of left off matter puffed out during previous stages in the star evolution.
The enormously energetic collision heats up the gas, releasing in turn a highly focused beam of electromagnetic radiation, all the way from visible light to X-rays to gamma rays, and whenever the spin axis is pointing towards us, we are able to see the flash. We are then, looking down the firing barrel.
And this is a handy explanation for the energy quandary. For now we do not need to assume as much energy is being sent in our direction as elsewhere, only the right amount focused this way, what is much more compatible with established physics.
The recently lauched SWIFT spacecraft promises to add new sensitivity and resolution coupled with greately improved automated communications so as to catch and analyze future GRB events at an unprecedent level of detail.
Disaster ahead?
If an extragalactic gamma ray beam gets here in such force to be detected even by primitive satellites not designed for that task, what could be the consequences of a local GRB pointing this way? Lethal, for sure. Most life will be wiped clean, and in fact there is some archeological evidence this has happened before.
Yet the likelihood of such an event is as vanishing small as for other catastrophes like a cometary impact and the like. Not that it cannot happen, but that we do not know for the time being of supernova candidates
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