Astrophysics question.

[lebeautemps]

Can someone please, in simple terms, describe the relationship between the following?

Binary stars, gamma ray burst, synchrotron radiation and muons.

And do all binary stars eventually collide?

Comments

[cdave]

Damn it Lewis!

Could you report this as spam please? If enough people do, they tend to block the IPs for a few days.

[purplecthulhu]

I posted this in response to major_clanger's forwarding of your question on his LJ. There's more from others over there as well...

ust to expand on this...

Only binaries that are in close orbits will have any likelihood of colliding.

GRBs are thought to mostly be a special class of high mass star supernova, possibly involving the creation of a black hole, but they are not currently well understood.

Synchrotron radiation is a general class of radiation that comes from relativistic charged particles moving in a magnetic field. It does occur in pulsars, but also occurs in quasars, towards the centre of our own galaxy and in artificial synchrotron radiation sources such as the Diamond synchrotron near Didcot. Synchrotron radiation is characterized by its non-thermal, power law spectrum whose slope depends on the energy distribution of the relativistic electrons.

Muons are fundamental particles which are, as said above, effectively heavy electrons. They are produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays.

[purplecthulhu]

I guess that's a fair summary, yes.