re gamma ray bursters where are they in article steinly apr topaz ucsc edu steinly topaz ucsc edu steinn sigurdsson writes the problem with oort cloud sources is that absolutely no plausible mechanism has been proposed it would have to involve new physics as far as i can tell closest to conventional oort sources is a model of b field pinching by comets it s got too many holes in it to count but at least it was a good try so you have a plausible model for grb s at astronomical distances recent observations have just about ruled out the merging neutron star hypothesis which had a lot of problems anyhow we have to look for implausible models and what is fundamentally allowed independent of models a paper on the possibility of grb s in the oort cloud just came through the astrophysics abstract service to get a copy of this paper send a message to astro ph babbage sissa it with the subject line get here is the abstract of that paper the currently favored explanation for the origin of grbs puts them at cosmological distances but as long as there is no distance indicator to these events all possible sources which are isotropically distributed should remain under consideration this is why the oort cloud of comets is kept on the list although there is no known mechanism for generating grbs from cometary nuclei unlikely as it may seem the possibility that grbs originate in the solar cometary cloud cannot be excluded until it is disproved we use the available data on the distribution of grbs the batse catalogue up to march and the catalogue of cometary orbits by marsden and williams to investigate whether there is any observational indication for correlations between the angular distributions of grbs and comets aphelia assuming that the distribution of aphelia direction reflect at least to some extent true variations in the column density of the oort cloud we also apply the vov test to both distributions we have performed a variety of statistical tests a kolmogorov smirnov test for the distributions in galactic latitude a chi test for the spherical multiple moments and a d cross correlation analysis including testing sub samples for isolating the effect of possible observational biases these tests imply that it is unlikely that the two distributions agree but the statistical significance is not sufficient for ruling out any connection with complete confidence we performed monte carlo simulations which show that only when the number of bursts exceeds sim it is possible to rule out a correlation between the angular distributions currently it is only the combination of these tests with the large disagreement found for the vov parameter which makes the oort cloud of comets unlikely to be related to grbs
