What Do Gamma Rays and Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds Have to Do With Story Ideas?
This play (and film) came to mind when I received a series of NASA’s Science News emails over the past two weeks about gamma-ray bursts and a Gamma-ray Burst Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. • Gamma ray bursts were only discovered a little over 40 years ago and still mystify astrophysicists. Experts from 25 countries met recently to discuss and debate clues to the biggest explosions since the Big Bang itself (if you believe in the Big Bang Theory — emphasis on the word “theory,” I hasten to add.) • On top of that, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been discovering interesting cosmic data. Here are four NASA articles that can give you more information. (All links open in new windows so you can find your way back here.) 1) The first article gives an excellent overview of gamma ray bursts. Gamma-ray bursts were discovered in the 1960s during the Cold War. US satellites keeping an eye out for Soviet nuclear testing detected intense bursts of gamma radiation. The bursts weren’t co
