Mathematicians at the University of Leeds have proposed a radical explanation for the bright flashes in the universe that are one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy today. The flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are beams of high energy radiation produced by jets of plasma from massive dying stars. The orthodox model for this […]
Four articles in the journal Nature discuss a mysterious new type of gamma ray burst that doesn’t fit with our current model of supernovae. Termed a “hybrid gamma-ray burst”, the phenomenon was first observed with NASA’s Swift satellite on 14 June 2006, and has since been studied with the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based […]
Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) have baffled scientists for more than three decades since their discovery in 1973. They can last anywhere from fractions of a second to minutes, and they can come from any direction in the sky, shining billions of times brighter than their host galaxies. The main problem for scientists trying to observe […]
Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have set a new astronomical record by observing the afterglow of the most distant gamma ray burst ever. The Italian astronomers said the afterglow had a measured red-shift of 6.3, meaning the light has taken 12.7 billion years to reach Earth. Science’s best estimates put the age of the […]
