Northwestern University | 2020 Jul 14
Rare event occurred 10 billion lightyears away, 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang
SGRB 181123B is the most distant short gamma-ray burst with its afterglow measured. Incredibly fast and faint, these events are notoriously difficult to catch. Event offers rare opportunity to study a much younger universe. New research shows that neutron stars in a ‘teenage’ universe could merge relatively quickly.The afterglow of GRB181123B, captured by the Gemini North telescope. The afterglow is
marked with a circle. Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/
K. Paterson & W. Fong (Northwestern University) Image Processing: Travis Rector
(University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
The farther away an object lies in the universe, the fainter it appears through the lens of a telescope.
So when a Northwestern University-led team of astrophysicists detected an afterglow of a short gamma-ray burst (SGRB) located 10 billion light-years away, they were shocked. Afterglows, after all, are already incredibly faint and fast signals -- sometimes lasting mere hours.
Known as SGRB 181123B, the burst occurred just 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang. It is the second most-distant well-established SGRB ever detected and the most distant event with an optical afterglow.
“We certainly did not expect to discover a distant SGRB, as they are extremely rare and very faint,” said Northwestern’s Wen-fai Fong, a senior author of the study. “We perform ‘forensics’ with telescopes to understand its local environment, because what its home galaxy looks like can tell us a lot about the underlying physics of these systems.”
“We believe we are uncovering the tip of the iceberg in terms of distant SGRBs,” said Kerry Paterson, the study’s first author. “That motivates us to further study past events and intensely examine future ones.” ...
Gemini Observatory’s Quick Reflexes Capture Fleeting Flash
Gemini Observatory | NSF NOIRLab | 2020 Jul 14
Maunakea Observatories’ Quick Reflexes Capture Fleeting Flash
W.M. Keck Observatory | 2020 Jul 14
Discovery of the Optical Afterglow of Short GRB 181123B at z = 1.754:
Implications for Delay Time Distributions ~ Kerry Paterson et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2007.03715 > 07 Jul 2020