Talk:Gamma-ray burst

Mass extinction on Earth - 10% survival rate citation

this is said by one of the sientist who also worked on the "Did a gamma-ray burst initiate the late Ordovician mass extinction?" report, on the episode "Human Extinction" of the "Earth Investigated" on the National "Geographic Channel"

posting this here to be sure that this information doesn't get lost (and it's not enough for reference)

Add the light curves of all known grbs

If you added the light curves of all known grbs what would the resulting curve look like? Just granpa (talk) 06:57, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

Accuracy of 'Energetics and Beaming' section

In the section on 'Energetics and Beaming'

"Assuming the gamma-ray explosion to be spherical, the energy output of GRB 080319B would be within a factor of two of the rest-mass energy of the Sun (the energy which would be released were the Sun to be converted entirely into radiation).

No known process in the universe can produce this much energy in such a short time."

I find "within a factor of two" to be problematic. Since it could mean higher or lower by a factor of two? Also, in the original paper it isn't clear how a calculation of the energy of this GRB would be performed under the assumption that it is a sphere.

I also find the "no known process" troubling, since event GW150914 (gravitational wave signal from a binary black hole inspiral) released 3 solar mass rest energy equivalents in 0.2 seconds. (Teichii492 (talk) 00:19, 14 October 2018 (UTC))

A factor of two is quite a good precision for astronomical calculations. Many astronomically important numbers are known with much worse precision. Ruslik_Zero 19:50, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

I believe the article isn't referring to precision, which i think is part of the issue here, even if it is referring to precision it isn't clear. Let me make clearer the issue i see here:

It seems the article is trying to say that, given the energy observations of the GRB, if you were to assume that the source emits this energy homogeneously and spherically that this gamma ray burst would have an energy release to "within a factor of two" of the energy release were the sun to have it's mass converted perfectly into energy. It is the "within a factor of two" that is the main problem with the language. The other issue is the scientific accuracy of the claim.

I've gone ahead and removed the sentence "No known process in the universe can produce this much energy in such a short time. Rather, " as i believe this statement is vague and factually incorrect. It doesn't refer to any energy value specifically and only from close reading can you assume that it is in reference to GRB080319 which emitted 1.3×10⁴⁷Joules over 30 seconds whereas GW150914 emitted 3 solar rest-mass energies, which works out as 5.37×10⁴⁷Joules in 0.2 seconds. Which invalidates the claim.(Teichii492 (talk) 23:18, 14 October 2018 (UTC))

References

Wording

"...has been determined to have had the highest energy, 1 Tera electron volts (Tev), ever observed for such a cosmic event"

That would not make it much of an explosion. I assume the intent is something like "... produced gamma rays with an energy of 1 TeV..."? 175.36.102.13 (talk) 07:16, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

 Done Ruslik_Zero 10:22, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Light Curve Image Units for Y Axis are... What?

It doesn't say anywhere what exactly the units in the Y axis are in this image. It just gives arbitrary figures with no context. Even the description asks what units it's in. Which should be a red flag.

I think if this were presented as a text edit (hypothetically), with content of equal quality, and lacking or cotext, it would seem likely it would be questioned at the very least, and likely removed. But, please correct me if I'm mistaken in this presumption.

There are other potential issues, like the graphs all beimg wildly different scales, which can be misleading. But I think the lack of any proper units for Y should be enough.

I would suggest fixing the graphs so they're at least logarithmic or something to get them all to the same scale,, if possible. It's very interesting information and it's a shame it isn't more accurate. But, unfortunately, without even knowing what units Y is, it seems it would be best to remove it outright. Again, please correct me if I'm mistaken in writing this. VoidHalo (talk) 10:55, 22 August 2023 (UTC)