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Strange flashes linked to stars merging rather than dying

Long bursts of γ-rays usually signal the death of massive stars, but an emission detected last year suggests that a long burst with peculiar properties originated from the merger of stars in a compact binary system.
  1. Luigi Piro

    1. Luigi Piro is at the Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, INAF, 00133 Rome, Italy.

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Brief, intense flashes known as γ-ray bursts appear every day at random locations in the sky. These bursts are classified according to their duration. Short γ-ray bursts, lasting less than one second, are thought to derive from the merging of two neutron stars in a binary system, whereas long γ-ray bursts are active for a few seconds or more, and result from the collapse of a massive star. Four papers published in this issue of Nature by Troja et al.1, Rastinejad et al.2, Mei et al.3 and Yang et al.4 now challenge this long-standing paradigm, by providing evidence of a long γ-ray burst that seems to have been produced by the merger of a compact binary system.

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Nature 612, 213-214 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04165-7

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The author declares no competing interests.

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