Apparently it’s the summer for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). First we reported on a gamma-ray mystery, then space gold, and now compact mergers. Turns out, they all may be one in the same.

Long-duration gamma-ray bursts are associated with supernova, but elusive short-duration GRBs last less than two seconds, making it hard for astronomers to determine their origin. But we are in luck! Increased detection leads to improved knowledge, and now we may have true answers.

The same short-duration GRB (named GRB 130603B) seen on June 3rd that produced a few moons’ worth of gold was still visible nine days later when the Hubble Space Telescope observed its remains.

Hubble saw a faint red object, which a team of researchers led by Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester identified as the common signature of a kilonova.

Kilonovas usually result from compact merger events in which decaying elements produce a recognizable optical signal. Because the kilonova and the gamma-ray burst happened together, astronomers can assume causation rather than just correlation.

“This observation finally solves the mystery of the origin of short gamma-ray bursts,” Tanvir said. “Many astronomers, including our group, have already provided a great deal of evidence that long-duration gamma-ray bursts (those lasting more than two seconds) are produced by the collapse of extremely massive stars. But we only had weak circumstantial evidence that short bursts were produced by the merger of compact objects. This result now appears to provide definitive proof supporting that scenario.”

The new knowledge can be used to revise the sequence of events preceding a GRB. First, two extremely dense stars move close together, and approach one another as their gravitational waves disrupt space-time nearby. The stars then “merge into a death spiral that kicks out highly radioactive material,” according to NASA. This explosion culminates with a kilonova. These collisions are about 1,000 times brighter than a nova, but between one tenth and one one-hundredth the brightness of a supernova.

“Previously, astronomers had been looking at the aftermath of short-period bursts largely in optical light, and were not really finding anything besides the light of the gamma-ray burst itself,” explained Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of Tanvir’s research team. “But this new theory predicts that when you compare near-infrared and optical images of a short gamma-ray burst about a week after the blast, the kilonova should pop out in the infrared, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”

As always, this is only the first step in a major discovery. Stay tuned as the research develops!

The findings were published earlier this month in Nature.

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA, ESA, N. Tanvir (University of Leicester), A. Fruchter (STScI), and A. Levan (University of Warwick)

I’m writing this from more than 8,000 feet (around 2,500 meters, for the more metric-ly inclined) above sea level, in the control room of one of the twin 6.5–meter Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory, near the southern end of Chile’s Atacama Desert. I’m tagging along on a night of observing with Jackie Faherty and Chris Tinney as they measure distances and chemical compositions of exotic objects known as brown dwarfs. For the next three Science Today entries, I’ll try my best to tell the story of this one night of observing and to give a sense of what Faherty and Tinney are attempting to learn about these tiny, faint stellar wannabes.

The night’s work starts in the afternoon. The instruments require calibration, which can take place long before the sky gets dark. Because the observations will involve taking both images (basically photographs) and spectra (a “fingerprint” of the light) of the brown dwarfs, they will use both the FourStar camera and the FIRE spectrograph. Astronomers have a more fastidious approach to their images than, say, your average Instagram user, so they carefully characterize the camera’s responsiveness and uniformity. For the spectrograph, they create a map of how the light splits into its constituent wavelengths using the equivalent of neon billboard lights aimed at the instrument.

At sunset, a few clouds in the southwest cause some concern: astronomers prefer their sunsets dull, unimpressive, and cloud-free. The worry passes, however, and as the sky darkens, the work begins in earnest.

Only four days from full, the moon brightens the sky considerably. For astronomers who observe in visible wavelengths (what we see with our eyes), this would ruin a perfectly good night. Consequently, many seek out “dark time,” defined as the first few nights before or after the new moon. Luckily, brown dwarfs show up best in infrared light, so tonight’s observations can take place in the “bright time,” three to five nights before or after the full moon. Indeed, the astronomers appreciate not having to deal with pitch-black observing conditions: “It’s inconvenient. You can’t see the clouds, and you trip over things,” Tinney notes.

A little more calibration occurs as the sky darkens, including pointing and focusing the telescope, and then the observations begin. “The focus at the beginning of the night changes rapidly because the temperature is dropping,” Faherty explains. “So we take shorter exposures, and continually monitor the images for out-of focus stars, which look like little donuts.”

Ultimately, Faherty and Tinney want to determine each object’s precise location in the sky—a process known as astrometry—as well as its light fingerprint—a process known as spectroscopy.

Particularly for this kind of project, astronomers need excellent “seeing,” which refers to “the blurring the atmosphere produces,” as Tinney describes succinctly. More blurring means the light gets spread out over a larger area of the detector, making precision work on faint brown dwarfs far more challenging.

Astronomers describe the quality of seeing in terms of the apparent angular diameter of a star. Optimal observing conditions at Las Campanas can yield seeing of 0.4 arcseconds or better—equivalent to the diameter of a penny observed from a distance of twelve miles (nearly twenty kilometers). This evening started with seeing around 0.5 arcseconds, but as the night wears on, the seeing drops to nearly 0.3 arcseconds! A great night! (Or perhaps simply observational karma: on Faherty’s last visit to the Magellan telescope, the seeing averaged 1.4 arcseconds, and the observatory shut down because of high winds. C’est l’astronomie.)

Amazingly, these high-quality observations can translate into even more impressive precision when it comes to locating the brown dwarfs relative to the other stars in the image. The resolution of the detector (about 0.16 arcseconds per pixel for FourStar) combined with good seeing means they can pinpoint an object’s location down to a few milliarcseconds—that’s right, 4% the apparent size of the object itself! Such excellent conditions also make it possible to tease apart the atmospheric properties of some of the faintest compact sources in the vicinity of the Sun.

Tomorrow, I’ll share a little more about brown dwarfs and the particular challenge that Faherty and Tinney plan to address, and on Wednesday, I’ll give a summary of how the evening’s work went and what it could mean for the next steps in brown dwarf science.

Ryan Wyatt is the director of the Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the California Academy of Sciences.

Image:  Karl Schultz