LONDON - Astronomers said yesterday they may have solved a mystery that has baffled them for more than 20 years where do bursts of gamma rays come from? Reporting in the science journal, Nature, they said they had seen for the first time a flash of light to match the invisible gamma radiation - which should help them define precisely just where the intriguing outbursts of short wave radiation are coming from.
Dr Jan van Paradijs of the University of Alabama and a team of international colleagues claim the radiation could have come from an explosive collision between two neutron stars at the far end of the universe. His group first saw the burst using a satellite especially made to watch for gamma rays. They were able to turn standard telescopes to the appropriate part of space. There they saw a blur in the sky - a "transient and fading optical source". It lasted for a month before fading out.
Astronomers at the internationally run Isaac Newton Group of telescopes on the Canary island of La Palma also turned their attention to that part of space - and saw the fading blur. They are now analysing the new data to determine whether the gamma rays come from within the Earth's own Milky Way galaxy or from near the edge of the universe.
"If it is indeed a distant galaxy ... gamma ray bursts are confirmed as the brightest objects in the universe," Dr Bohdan Paczynski of Princeton and Dr Ralph Wijers of Cambridge comment in Nature. They say the radiation could come from the collision of two neutron stars - releasing as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does in a billion years.