May 6 1998
From The Space Library
At a NASA news conference, astronomers discussed the discovery of the largest explosion ever sighted in space. The journal Nature published three papers about the event, detected on 14 December 1997. The explosion, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) designated GRB971214, had occurred 12 billion years ago and had "apparently outshone all the rest of the universe" for about 40 seconds. The Italian-Dutch orbiting gamma-ray observatory BeppoSAX had measured the sharp pulse of gamma rays and "pinpointed the position of the rays' source." The United States' Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite had also detected the gamma-ray pulse, and scientific institutions around the world had monitored the after-effects of the explosion. Twelve hours afterward, John R. Thorstensen of Dartmouth College had used a 94-inch-diameter (49-centimeter-diameter) telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona to detect a visible afterglow, which lasted for about two weeks. After the glow had faded, the scientists had discovered a faint galaxy in the same location. A team of American, Italian, and Indian astronomers, led by two California Institute of Technology scientists, used the Keck II Telescope in Hawaii to measure the distance from Earth to the source of the burst. No theorists were able to explain the explosion, and no existing models explaining GRBs could explain the amount of energy emitted from GRB971214. The scientists suggested the possibility that a superdense neutron star had ripped apart as it disappeared into a neighboring black hole, or that a violent merger of two black holes had caused the burst.
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