Flashes of Ignorance

摘要

Looking for a cosmic mystery? Once a day, on average, a burst of very high energy gamma rays from an unknown source at an unknown distance is detected from somewhere on the sky. The brightest bursts are 100,000 times brighter than the dimmest bursts. If they hail from far beyond our Milky Way galaxy, then some pack more energy into each burst than the total energy generated by the Sun over two consecutive ten-billion-year lifetimes. We don't know how their energy is generated. We don't know whether conventional laws of physics can account for their existence. We don't know diddly.