Engineering Papers⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Gehrels. Neil

Publications and source records attributed to Gehrels. Neil.

How to Swallow a Sun

At the heart of our milky way and of virtually every other large galaxy lurks a deep cosmic mystery- a supermassive black hole. Squeezing millions to billions of times more mass than our sun into regions smaller in size than our solar system, these objects are so bizarre as to seem almost mystical. No one yet understands exactly how nature has managed to compress so much matter into such small spaces. What is clear is that the hidden gravitational hands of supermassive black holes reach out to shape their surrounding galaxies in profound yet subtle ways. By studying the growth and behavior of these ghostly black holes, scientists hope to unlock the secrets of how galaxies themselves are born and evolve.

Cenko, S. Bradley↗

Fermi/GBM Observations of SGRJ0501 + 4516 Bursts

We present our temporal and spectral analyses of 29 bursts from SGRJ0501+4516, detected with the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope during the 13 days of the source activation in 2008 (August 22 to September 3). We find that the T(sub 90) durations of the bursts can be fit with a log-normal distribution with a mean value of approx. 123 ms. We also estimate for the first time event durations of Soft Gamma Repeater (SGR) bursts in photon space (i.e., using their deconvolved spectra) and find that these are very similar to the T(sub 90)s estimated in count space (following a log-normal distribution with a mean value of approx. 124 ms). We fit the time-integrated spectra for each burst and the time-resolved spectra of the five brightest bursts with several models. We find that a single power law with an exponential cutoff model fits all 29 bursts well, while 18 of the events can also be fit with two black body functions. We expand on the physical interpretation of these two models and we compare their parameters and discuss their evolution. We show that the time-integrated and time-resolved spectra reveal that E(sub peak) decreases with energy flux (and fluence) to a minimum of approx. 30 keV at F = 8.7 x 10(exp -6)erg/sq cm/s, increasing steadily afterwards. Two more sources exhibit a similar trend: SGRs J1550 - 5418 and 1806 - 20. The isotropic luminosity, L(sub iso), corresponding to these flux values is roughly similar for all sources (0.4 - l.5 x 10(exp 40) erg/s.

Lin, Lin↗