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Gamma-ray astronomy

Bursting out all over

Nature volume 387, pages 859–860 (1997)Cite this article

Enigmatic bursts of γ-rays from cosmic sources are detected about once a day from every direction on the sky. During their brief duration, typically between 10-2 and 103 seconds1, these bursts often have the brightest γ-ray intensities ever seen. Now, after almost three decades of observation and speculation, the distance scale to γ-ray burst (GRB) sources seems at last to have been settled. Evidence has been growing at a remarkable rate in the past few months — the most striking pieces appearing on pages and of this issue2,3 — to support the proposal that most, and perhaps all, of the bursts come from explosions involving neutron stars or black holes near the edge of our observable Universe. If this is indeed the case, GRB sources are among the most powerful events in the Universe. This was the view of most of the participants in a GRB workshop last month.

In 1991, the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE), on board the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, began to accumulate what has now grown to almost 2,000 burst observations. These show us to be at the centre of a nearly homogeneous distribution of bursting sources, and the paucity of faint bursts implies that we are seeing almost to the edge of the source population4. These two features are natural consequences of any uniform source distribution in the simplest cosmological models for our expanding Universe5. Other suggestions, for example that GRBs are from relatively small, recurrent explosions on the surface of neutron stars now in the halo of our own Galaxy6, needed some ad hoc tuning of parameters such as delays in the onset of explosions. This made such models less appealing, even though they more easily explained certain controversial features of some bursts (such as cyclotron resonance spectral features, periodicities of several seconds, and possible burst source repetitions).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, CB3 OHA, Cambridge, UK

    Joshua S. Bloom

  2. Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, 10027, New York, USA

    Malvin Ruderman

Authors
  1. Joshua S. Bloom
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  2. Malvin Ruderman
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Bloom, J., Ruderman, M. Bursting out all over. Nature 387, 859–860 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/43082

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