Loving Explosions

This was first posted on November 17, 2017. The latest explanation of gamma ray bursts are that they’re massive stars going supernovae and collapsing immediately to black holes and in the process, aiming high-intensity jets at our skies. They’re still the brightest things in the universe, the brightness of a trillion suns, and they last for anywhere from about 10 eyeblinks to a short nap. They’re still not understood very well, but how well is a human ever going to understand something as inhumanly bright as a trillion suns that operates on human time scales? However. Military guys and astronomers both loving explosions, that I can understand. Years ago, talking about the persistent rumor that the Hubble Space Telescope was an off-the-shelf spy satellite retrofitted for astronomy*, I told a NASA employee that I was pretty sure academic astronomers were culturally anti-military and they wouldn’t be crossing lines and dealing with spies or the defense department. The NASA employee…