This interesting biography of Rosalind Franklin is very hard to put down.Lots of physics concepts set in the drama of a one woman's life. Her famous x-ray image of the DNA molecule is one of the most famous scientific images ever. But she died young and was not given the Nobel Prize with the others, Wilkins, Crick, Watson.
Back in the early 1960s, the United States launched a few satellites, the Vela satellites, to detect secret nuclear weapons testing by the Soviet Union. By treaty between the US and USSR, no one was to test nuclear weapons above ground; underground testing was permitted. To monitor the Russians, US scientists at Los Alamos developed the Vela platform.
Nobody ever saw the Russkies nuking off any above ground tests, but while the detectors were not over Siberia, they could definitely see bursts of high energy gamma rays from sources outside the solar system.
Excellent.
In the 1970s, they began publishing scientific studies of these gamma ray bursters. The image below is an animation of the April 27 burst. Click the image to see the animation.
There is still a lot of study going on as to why these GRBs happen all over the universe. We do not know for sure, and neither do the Russians. This GRB was so close and so well-imaged, that maybe someone will now crack the puzzle, using F = ma, quantum physics and all the concepts we study in PSC1121.
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