As neutron stars collide, some of the debris blasts away in particle jets moving at nearly the speed of light, producing a brief burst of gamma rays. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab
“Astronomers have long believed that gamma-ray bursts fell into two categories: long-duration bursts from imploding stars and short-duration bursts from merging compact stellar objects,” said Chris Fryer, an astrophysicist and Laboratory Fellow at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. Fryer is coauthor and leader of the modeling team on a paper about the phenomenon published today in the journal.
On December 11, 2021, several observatories and satellites recorded a very bright, 50-second gamma-ray burst and optical, infrared, and x-ray emissions associated with the burst. This long burst was relatively nearby—about a billion light-years away in a different galaxy than the—but its emission characteristics did not fit the profile of long-burst events.