1. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA
2. Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903-0818, USA
3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
4. Department of Physics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-4002, USA
5. Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London, Dorking RH5 6NT, UK
6. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
7. Joint Center for Astrophysics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland 21250, USA
8. National Research Council, 2101 Constitution Ave NW, Washington DC 20418, USA
9. Universities Space Research Association, 10211 Wincopin Circle, Suite 500, Columbia, Maryland 21044-3432, USA
10. Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
11. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA
12. INAF—Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via Bianchi 46, I-23807 Merate, Italy
13. Universita degli studi di Milano Bicocca, Piazza delle Scienze 3, I-20126 Milano, Italy
14. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California 94928, USA
15. INAF—Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Cosmica, Via Ugo La Malfa 153, I-90146 Palermo, Italy
16. ASI Science Data Center, Via Galileo Galilei, I-00044 Frascati, Italy
17. SP Systems Inc., 7500 Greenway Center Drive, Greenbelt, Maryland 20770, USA
18. Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
19. UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720-7450, USA
20. Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Sternwarte 5, D-07778 Tautenburg, Germany
21. NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center, NSSTC, XD-12, 320 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, Alabama 35805, USA
22. Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, JAXA, Kanagawa 229-8510, Japan
23. Universities Space Research Association, NSSTC, XD-12, 320 Sparkman Drive, Huntsville, Alabama 35805, USA
24. Office of Space Science, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC 20546, USA
25. Stockholm Observatory, Department of Astronomy, AlbaNova, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
26. Astronomical Institute "Anton Pannekoek", University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
27. Department of Physics, Saitama University, Sakura, Saitama 338-8570, Japan

Correspondence to: N. Gehrels¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to N.G. (Email: gehrels@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov).

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) come in two classes¹: long (> 2 s), soft-spectrum bursts and short, hard events. Most progress has been made on understanding the long GRBs, which are typically observed at high redshift (z 1) and found in subluminous star-forming host galaxies. They are likely to be produced in core-collapse explosions of massive stars². In contrast, no short GRB had been accurately (< 10") and rapidly (minutes) located. Here we report the detection of the X-ray afterglow from—and the localization of—the short burst GRB 050509B. Its position on the sky is near a luminous, non-star-forming elliptical galaxy at a redshift of 0.225, which is the location one would expect^{3, 4} if the origin of this GRB is through the merger of neutron-star or black-hole binaries. The X-ray afterglow was weak and faded below the detection limit within a few hours; no optical afterglow was detected to stringent limits, explaining the past difficulty in localizing short GRBs.

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