re gamma ray bursters where are they prb access digex com pat writes what evidence indicates that gamma ray bursters are very far away given the enormous power i was just wondering what if they are quantum black holes or something like that fairly close by why would they have to be at galactic ranges gamma ray bursts grbs are seen coming equally from all directions however given the number of bright ones there are too few faint ones to be consistent with being equally dense for as far as we can see it is as if they are all contained within a finite sphere or a sphere with fuzzy edges with us at the center these measurements are statistical and you can always hide a sufficiently small number of a different type of grb with a different origin in the data i am assuming that there is only one population of grbs the data indicates that we are less than of the radius of the center of the distribution the only things the earth is at the exact center of are the solar system at the scale of the oort cloud of comets way beyond pluto and the universe cosmological theories placing grbs throughout the universe require supernova type energies to be released over a timescale of milliseconds oort cloud models tend to be silly even by the standards of astrophysics if grbs were galactic i e distributed through the milky way galaxy you would expect them to be either concentrated in the plane of the galaxy for a disk population or towards the galactic center for a spherical halo population we don t see this so if they are galactic they must be in a halo at least light years in radius and we would probably start to see grbs from the andromeda galaxy assuming that it has a similar halo for comparison the earth is light years from the center of the galaxy my own pet theory is that it s flying saucers entering hyperspace the aren t concentrated in the known spacelanes and we don t see many coming from zeta reticuli and tau ceti but the reason i am asking is that most everyone assumes that they are colliding nuetron stars or spinning black holes i just wondered if any mechanism could exist and place them closer in there are more than grb different models in the refereed literature right now the theorists have a sort of unofficial moratorium on new models until new observational evidence comes in david m palmer palmer alumni caltech edu palmer tgrs gsfc nasa gov
