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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

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New gamma ray burst violates the explanations of scientists

The uncertainty of science: A newly discovered long gamma ray burst (GRB) that appears to have been formed by the merger of two neutron stars has contradicted the long held views of scientists as to the origin of this particular type of GRB.

Prior to the discovery of this burst, astronomers mostly thought that there were just two ways to produce a GRB. The collapse of a massive star just before it explodes in a supernova could make a long gamma-ray burst, lasting more than two seconds. Or a pair of dense stellar corpses called neutron stars could collide, merge and form a new black hole, releasing a short gamma-ray burst of two seconds or less.

But there had been some outliers. A surprisingly short GRB in 2020 seemed to come from a massive star’s implosion (SN: 8/2/21). And some long-duration GRBs dating back to 2006 lacked a supernova after the fact, raising questions about their origins. “We always knew there was an overlap,” says astrophysicist Chryssa Kouveliotou of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who wrote the 1993 paper that introduced the two GRB categories, but was not involved in the new work. “There were some outliers which we did not know how to interpret.”

There’s no such mystery about GRB 211211A: The burst lasted more than 50 seconds and was clearly accompanied by a kilonova, the characteristic glow of new elements being forged after a neutron star smashup.

Kouveliotou’s claim is not how I remember things back in 1990s. Then, the astronomers seemed certain that the two GRB classes were entirely separate, with no overlap, despite the large number of uncertainties.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

2 comments

  • Chris

    The words “We think” comes to mind

  • Max

    “New gamma ray burst violates the explanations of scientist“
    I am shocked! It always baffles me when scientist who are so certain that they figured out their environment, that they are not open to any new discoveries because it does not fit their model.
    It turns there world upside down.

    Instead of revisiting the model to come up with better explanations that fit the evidence, they would rather fudge the evidence and shoehorn it into the existing model. This is why I believe most scientists are not scientist but highly educated secular priests, ritually ordained in the religious rituals and incantations with a mantra they must repeat and perform like some kind of taboo or superstition that keeps their ordered mind of certainty from strain outside the lines of creative process.
    There lies heresy when questioning the theocracy which will destroy a reputation and a life‘s work undone.
    Even Galileo waited until his old age to reveal his observations, although he spent the rest of his life as a heretic under house arrest, his observations were verified and established as fact.

    Just as two thunderstorms miles apart can connect through lightning with a massive amount of electron discharge… (producing visual, audio, and magnetic affects which can be measured for 100’s of miles and even from space) so can clouds of dust and gas in space collect massive charges resulting in unusual gamma ray burst.
    Two large stellar objects could occasionally discharge to each other through the same gas clouds. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a collision has occurred between stellar objects.
    I would think this would be a rare thing to occur, if it’s even possible because gravity is one of the weaker forces in nature. (magnetic attraction a static fields is so much stronger) Objects must be extremely close to have an effect gravitationally on each other… And yet everything is connected by this force, even over great distances.

    As for black holes colliding, not very likely. There’s too many changes in physical properties with energies and unknown things that can occur that they are not taking into consideration. Just the time stopping at the event horizon would prevent a collision from occurring, or occurring so slowly that will take thousands if not millions of years.
    For example, because of the intense gravity, the space between Black holes, even though they could be a light years apart, would contract causing the massive gravitational bodies to merge through a wormhole. The larger would suck the smaller dry through the quantum straw (over millions of years from our perspective because of the absence of time in such a distorted reference frame)
    High energy leakage through a time distortion would be observable as low frequency background noise possibly radio burst. With a little imagination, it could also be the source of slow moving heavy particles known as cosmic radiation that has escaped through imperfect connections.

    When the mass of the smaller object has been consumed to the point the connection can no longer be sustained, the wormhole will snap like a rubber band, with any material inside being expelled into real time and space being accelerated in a massive energy burst!

    There can be neutron stars or normal stars who orbit other celestial bodies that momentarily make and break such a connection during a close encounter or parabolic orbit. A magnetos star would be essentially a capacitor waiting until its potential has been superseded to discharge such a large GammaRay burst.
    After all, we know gravitational attraction holds a galaxy together on a level that is observable but not detected easily… That’s why black matter or dark matter was created to explain to the simple mind what cannot be seen or imagined.
    Do not sail your ship beyond the sight of land, there are monsters out there and you could sail off the edge of the world…. Or discover something new and fantastic that will change the course of history!

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