w.t.f.
Apparantly the cosmic combination of a blue star and some sort of smaller celestial object with a high density of matter (neutron star or a black hole?) is turning light into gamma rays. In other words, creating matter where none previously existed. (The picture is a computer simulation of the pair of bodies, collectively name microquasar LS5039. )
posted by arielle at 4:16 PM 
COMMENTS:
rmd said: gamma rays are just high energy photons (light is relativly low energy photons), so they aren't "matter" in the sense of having a rest mass, so i don't think mass is being created. do you have alink for the story? it looks cool regardless.
arielle said: this is a link to the article. it's from the discovery channel so it, unfortunately, wasn't that heavy on the technical science side. if you find more concrete information, definitely post it!
rmd said: here's a link to a journal paper about the observation. i think what they cryptically refer to as "matter being made out of light" in the discovery channel article is just the fairly well known and very well understood process of pair production. not that it's not mind-bogglingly cool in it's own right, but it goes on all the time, this star system isn't a unique example of the phenomenon. in fact i can almost guarantee it's going on in hte physics lab across campus right now.
said: I thought that physicists only knew about solo "production," dork king.
arielle said: how is pair production reproduced in a laboratory setting?
rmd said: lots of different ways, but they all boil down to somehow producing gamma rays (of energy > 2m_e*c^2, where m_e is the electron/positron mass, and c is the speed of light), which pair produce electron-positron pairs with some probability when they get near matter. lots' of times these gamma rays can be produced by fairly routine nuclear decays, which is what i was referring to.
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