Brighter Than a Billion Billion Suns: Gamma-Ray Bursts Continue to Surprise
The Cherenkov Telescope Array, currently under construction, will use a network of more than 100 ground-based telescopes such as this one to monitor the long afterglows of ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray bursts.
In July 1967, at the height of the Cold War, American satellites that had been launched to look for Soviet nuclear weapons tests found something wholly unexpected. The Vela 3 and 4 satellites observed brief flashes of high-energy photons, or gamma rays, that appeared to be coming from space. Later, in a 1973 paper that compiled more than a dozen such mysterious events, astronomers would dub them gamma-ray bursts. “Since then, we’ve been trying to understand what these explosions are,” said Andrew Taylor, a physicist at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg.
After the initial discovery, astronomers debated where these bursts of gamma radiation were coming from — a critical clue for what’s powering them. Some thought that such bright sources must be nearby, in our solar system. Others argued that they’re in our galaxy, still others the cosmos beyond. Theories abounded; data did not.
