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Astrophysics

Radioactive glow as a smoking gun

The observation of infrared emission following a short γ-ray burst lends support to the hypothesis that mergers of compact binary systems cause such bursts and produce the heaviest nuclei in the cosmos. See Letter p.547

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Figure 1: Supercomputer simulation of the merger of two neutron stars19.

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Rosswog, S. Radioactive glow as a smoking gun. Nature 500, 535–536 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/500535a

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