Cometary Knots and High Energy Photons And Neutrinos From Gamma Ray Bursts

Abstract

The Hubble Space Telescope has recently discovered thousands of gigantic comet-like objects in a ring around the central star in the nearest planetary nebula. We suggest that such circumstellar rings exist around most stars. Collisions of the relativistic debris from gamma ray bursts in dense stellar regions with such gigantic comet-like objects, which have been stripped off from the circumstellar rings by gravitational perturbations, produce detectable fluxes of high energy $\gamma$-rays and neutrinos.