Press Release Bursts

One of the fun things about following science news through the Eurekalert press release aggregator is that work done by big collaborations tends to show up multiple times, in slightly different forms. Take, for example, the gamma-ray-burst results being released in Nature this week, which show up no less than five times: one, two, three, four, five. It’s entirely possible that I missed some others, too.

Each of those releases is written by the press office at a different institution, and each tries to make it sound like the people at their university made the most important contribution to the work. They’re all talking about exactly the same scientific results, but they end up having very little in common, though the first two do share my favorite quote about the findings:

“We have lots of data on this, dedicated lots of observation time, and we just can’t figure out what exploded,” said Neil Gehrels of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., lead author on one of the Nature reports.

“[We] just can’t figure out what exploded” is really about the best one-sentence summary you can come up with for these results. The press release burst has to do with the discovery of a couple of gamma ray bursts that completely confound the existing classification scheme. It had been thought that there were two types of GRB’s, divided into categories based on the duration of the burst. Short bursts, lasting something like a second or less, are thought to involve the collision of black holes or neutron stars, while long bursts, lasting several seconds or longer are associated with the explosion of really massive stars. Short bursts produce huge amounts of light in the gamma and X-ray regions of the spectrum, but little or no visible light, while long bursts are associated with massive supernovae, producing lots of visible light as well.

The new results concern the discovery of a couple of bursts that lasted a long time, but don’t appear to have a supernova in the area. Which is pretty baffling for astronomers, who thought they finally had this whole business figured out. This is yet another reminder of why I’m glad I’m not an astronomer…

4 comments

  1. Each of those releases is written by the press office at a different institution, and each tries to make it sound like the people at their university made the most important contribution to the work.

    It’s worse than that. On the NOAO Time Allocation Committee, the different collaborations each list the same GRB result as being their work.

    But, yeah, when the Knop 2003 paper came out, there were a few press releases from different places, each of which tried to emphasize their own place. The Vanderbilt one was fairest, obviously 🙂 Actually, truthfully, it was. Not only had I done most of the work on that paper, but the Vanderbilt press release (which was really an article in the online science magazine) had quotes from and pictures of people from two other institutions.

    -Rob

  2. This is yet another reminder of why I’m glad I’m not an astronomer…

    But if it was all figured out, what would be the fun in it? This is exactly what makes astronomy so exciting. In this particular case, we have a big puzzle, with explosions! It’s also an excellent example of what happens when people (i.e., astronomers) try to classify things (stars, galaxies, events, objects orbiting the Sun, etc.) based on only a few data points, and when they don’t understand what the fundamental physical differences yet … but then, figuring out what’s alike and what’s different is the first step in figuring out what’s actually causing the differences.

    Just wait a few more months, and they’ll have figured out how to fit these new “long short bursts” into their scheme of how-stars-go-boom, and then there’ll be a new GRB that doesn’t fit into the diagram…

  3. “The new results concern the discovery of a couple of bursts that lasted a long time, but don’t appear to have a supernova in the area.”

    And yet sometimes GRBs are associated with supernovas. Yes, this is one of several odd problems in astrophysics. If the GRBs are related to tachyonic precursors, the supernova that they are associated with may not be visible until some time afterwards. A great proof of this would be a later supernova from the same location.

    The other perhaps related astrophysical puzzles are (1) AGASA’s energy measurements discrepancy, (2) AGASA’s observation of correlated UHECRs, (3) Centauros, (4) Extreme transverse momenta and excess alignment in emulsion cosmic ray experiments, (5) Shower components that are highly parallel.

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