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NEWSNOTES

Gamma-Ray Bursts:
Pointed Our Way?
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) push astro-
physics to the limit. In the last two years
astronomers have established that these
brief flares of penetrating photons, which
bathe Earth about once a day on average,
originate in galaxies billions of light-years
away. That finding has raised a huge mys-
tery: how are GRBs powered? To be seen
halfway across the visible universe, the
most energetic bursts seem to be fueled by
the conversion of entire suns into gamma-
ray photons in some violent process that
persists for several seconds. If they shine
with equal brightness in all directions,
these bursts are more luminous than ex-
pected from even the latest model, the
hypernova, in which most of a massive
star suddenly collapses into a rapidly
spinning, highly magnetic black hole.
One possible out is the notion of
beaming, in which GRBs direct their en-
ergy outward in narrow beams rather
than in all directions. If beaming takes
place, we see a bright GRB only when
the beam happens to point toward
Earth. If GRBs are beamed, their total
New Gamma-Ray-Burst Clue energy requirements can drop by a fac-
tor of 10 or more, bringing hypernovae
When satellites recorded an especially powerful flare of gamma rays back into the realm of plausibility.
coming from the far-southern constellation Chamaeleon on May Statistics indirectly bolster the beaming
10th, Southern Hemisphere astronomers were ready. Among the tele-
hypothesis. Scientists have been debating
the possibility that GRBs and some rela-
scopes that examined the bursts fading afterglow (arrowed above)
was Antu, the 8.2-meter Unit Telescope 1 of the European Southern The Hubble Space Telescope wasnt in orbit
Observatorys four-unit Very Large Telescope being built in Chile. The when Supernova 1987A went off, so it couldnt
confirm this ground-based interferometric im-
spectrum of the afterglow showed intervening material at a redshift
age, which seems to show one blob on either
of 1.619, indicating a distance of at least roughly 9 billion light-years side of the exploding star. The blobs, with
for the burster itself. Scoring an astronomical first, two groups of as- their differing angular distances from the su-
tronomers using Antu measured polarization in the bursts fading pernova, may attest to relativistic jets that
emanated from the exploding star. If so, they
light. As seen 18 hours after the burst, when it had faded to 19th
may suggest a connection between super-
magnitude (in red light), the afterglow displayed a polarization of 1.7 novae and gamma-ray bursts.
percent. This indicates that at least some of the light was not ther-
mally emitted by hot material but was synchrotron radiation given
off by electrons moving at near-light speed in a magnetic field. This
may help unravel the gamma-ray-burst mystery. The infrared image
above, 5 arcminutes square, was made four hours earlier with ESOs
3.6-meter New Technology Telescope. Courtesy ESO.
PETER NISENSON

N
0.1 arcsec
E

20 August 1999 Sky & Telescope 1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
tively ordinary supernovae might be dif-
ferent manifestations of the same phe-
nomenon the hypernova process, per-
haps. As it happens, extragalactic
supernovae are hundreds of times more
frequent than energetic GRBs.
If at least some supernovae are hyper-
novae, might it be possible to see evidence
for their relativistic jets even when the jets
are not pointed toward Earth? Yes, ac-
cording to a paper in the June 10th Astro-
physical Journal Letters. Peter Nisenson
and Costas Papaliolios (Harvard-Smith-
sonian Center for Astrophysics) reanalyzed
speckle interferometry of Supernova
1987A taken only one month after that
stellar cataclysm was first seen in the
Large Magellanic Cloud. The reprocessed
images show a blob just to either side of
the supernova. If the blobs emanated
from the supernova explosion, they must
have emerged at 80 percent of the speed
of light, say the scientists. The blobs ap-
pear at different distances from SN 1987A
on the plane of the sky, as would be ex-
pected from luminous objects moving at
near light speed in opposite directions.

A Long Way Home


for GRB 970228 Advertisement
Gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs brief,
intense flares of gamma rays from
very deep space have puzzled the-
orists for three decades. But on Febru-
ary 28, 1997, astronomers made a
major breakthrough by catching a fad-
ing visible -light counterpart to a GRB
(S&T: July 1997, page 19). Since then,
several similar optical counterparts
have been seen in galaxies whose
redshifts, and hence distances, could
be measured. This has established
that GRBs occur billions of light-years
away and can release dozens or hun-
dreds of times more energy than a su-
pernova. Ironically, though, astrono-
mers have not known the redshift of
the galaxy in which GRB 970228 itself
took place that is, until George
Djorgovski (Caltech) and his col-
leagues announced the answer in a
May 3rd Internet posting. Sited in
Orion, GRB 970228s 26th-magnitude
host galaxy has a redshift of 0.695,
placing it roughly halfway across the
visible universe. The result comes
from several spectra obtained with
the 10-meter Keck II reflector.

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Sky & Telescope August 1999 21

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