Gammaray bursts test QG? how and whether.

[marcus]

Gammaray burst (GRB) observation is opening up prospects for testing physical theory.

In particular there are quantum models of gravitational collapse and of black holes which may be testable by observing NS-BH mergers (jargot for "neutronstar-blackhole")

Do you think some of today's QG approaches are testable? Could any be refuted by GRB observations, in your opinion? And if you think so, then HOW can GRB provide tests for QG?

I was reminded of this topic by today's Catdynamics blog
http://catdynamics.blogspot.com/

Steinn Sigurdsson watches the GRB reports here:
http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn3_archive.html

and he comments on GRB here
http://catdynamics.blogspot.com/2005/12/grb-here-we-go-again.html

---exerpt---
...Combined with GRB051211 we're now seeing what seem to be moderate redshift short lived progenitors; it is tempting to say we are seeing two sub-classes of short GRBs, one set associated with NS-NS mergers and longish(?) lifetimes before merger, the other being shorter lived NS-BH mergers...
---endquote---

 

[Chronos]

I think there are some testable predictions, in particular the spin up effects of accretion in binary systems. This is a pretty exciting field of study at the moment [hehe].

 

[CarlB]

There's several recent articles that suggest that the GRB "engine" turns on and off kind of quickly. Up to now, the light curves have been explained as "afterglow", but that idea is coming under attack. For example:

All evidence presented below, including spectral and particularly timing information during and around the giant flare, suggests that this giant flare was the result of internal dissipation of energy due to late central engine activity, rather than an afterglow-related effect.
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512615

I would think that these would be evidence against NS-NS or NS-BH mergers, and evidence instead that there is something going on pretty much continuously, but that it is usually hidden by the geometry of the accretion disk or something like that.

Since I suspect that matter is a condensation of superluminal particles, m guess is that the GRB engine is the event horizon itself with only the superluminal portion of the particles able to escape. The superluminal particles would then convert back to regular matter with extreme energies near the hole and the geometry of the accretion disk would determine whether or not we saw the fire works.

Carl