Jul 8 1998
From The Space Library
S. George Djorgovski, an astronomer at California Institute of Technology; Dale A. Frail, an astronomer with the Very Large Array (VLA) Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico; and their colleagues issued a notice to fellow astronomers regarding a gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected on 2 July. Frail and Djorgovski had combined the resources of the VLA and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to pinpoint the source of the burst, which they calculated to be a galaxy, "alive with new-forming stars," billions of light-years away from Earth. Although scientists did not yet know the cause of GRBs, Frail remarked, "the fact that this burst happened in a hot galaxy where new stars are being rapidly formed is probably the death knell for the theory that collisions between old, dying neutron stars are responsible for the gamma-ray bursts."
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