Starship Asterisk*

It is titled “Smoke and Mirrors,” but a new discovery from College of Charleston astrophysicist Jon Hakkila may be anything but smoke and mirrors.

Hakkila and student researchers have discovered a peculiarity in the light curves of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) that may provide a breakthrough in understanding the conditions that produce these events. GRBs are the intrinsically brightest explosions known in the universe. They last from seconds to minutes, and originate during the formation of a black hole accompanying a beamed supernova or colliding neutron stars. The narrow beam of intense GRB radiation can only be seen when the jet points toward Earth, but such an event can be seen across the breadth of the universe.

The researchers studying six very bright gamma-ray bursts discovered that the pulses composing these GRBs exhibited complex, time-reversible wavelike structures. In other words, each GRB pulse shows an event in which time appeared to repeat itself backwards. ...

• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1804.10130 > 26 Apr 2018 (v1), 18 Jul 2018 (v2)