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Gamma Ray Burst

What do gamma rays have to do with Harvard's success as an intellectual brand? Plenty.

Harvard: New breakthrough

Ever since Larry Summers, he of the Clinton admin fame, took over as president of Harvard, brand trackers in the world of academia have wondered what to expect. Summers, you see, had the reputation of being something of a supergeek, equally at ease with greek-scribbled blackboards and bleep-riddled conversations.

Would Harvard turn more worldly as an intellectual brand? Or would the real world turn more academic?

Well, so far, Harvard has turned more other-worldly than you'd expect. And in doing so, the world's foremost brand from academia has managed to engage ordinary non-academic folk in a curiosity cusp that few would have thought possible some years ago.

Credit goes to the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. Now, astrophysics is a difficult field, not least because of the 'astro' part, which drags the entire universe into the field of study. Given the limitations on mankind's own observatory capacity (Galileo's telescope was not all that long ago), the discipline has subsisted largely on elaborate approximations of the truth. Needless to say, very little could really be said with certainty.

In early April, however, the Smithsonian Centre made a breakthrough that made people sit up across the world. Gamma Ray Bursts, the Centre announced, originate in supernovae - exploding stars. This had long been suspected, but could now be stated with a huge degree of confidence. Wow.

The most awestruck of all, however, are the people who actually saw the Gamma Ray Burst that sparked off all that brainwork. The astrophysicists on watch. It was the 29th of March, 2003, when the Leo constellation of the night sky came alight with the most spectacular Gamma Ray Burst ever recorded in human history.

Spectacular because it was just 2 billion light years away (typical bursts occur 10 billion or more light years away), and so dazzling that the "optical afterglow was still over a trillion times brighter than the sun over two hours later", as the BBC reported the event.

That such detailed descriptions are possible at all is due, in large measure, to the efforts made in recent years to put the observation infrastructure in place. And here, credit must go to the US-French initiative in launching the High Energy Transient Explorer-2 (HETE-2) satellite, aboard which the French Gamma Ray Telescope (FreGate) did the vital job of capturing the event of 29th March in all its glory.

For those interested in finer details, HETE-2 is the joint work of America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, in trans-Atlantic partnership with France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Ecole nationale Superieure de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace (ENSAE) and Centre d'Edtude Spatiale des Rayonnemeats (CESR, the maker of FreGate).

That's a lot of effort, surely. And quite a mouthful to remember, too. Easier, isn't it, to just think of it as Harvard's breakthrough? A nice seven-letter brand. A two-syllable word, easy to pronounce, easy to remember.

Actually, why not? In any case, it was Harvard that deciphered and simplified the whole episode for non-astrophysicists. And even if it's still greek to a lot of people, sorting it all out for common understanding is value-addition worthy of profound respect.

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