Abstract
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) come in two classes1: long (>2 s), soft-spectrum bursts and short, hard events. Most progress has been made on understanding the long GRBs, which are typically observed at high redshift (z ≈ 1) and found in subluminous star-forming host galaxies. They are likely to be produced in core-collapse explosions of massive stars2. In contrast, no short GRB had been accurately (<10″) and rapidly (minutes) located. Here we report the detection of the X-ray afterglow from-and the localization of-the short burst GRB 050509B. Its position on the sky is near a luminous, non-star-forming elliptical galaxy at a redshift of 0.225, which is the location one would expect3,4 if the origin of this GRB is through the merger of neutron-star or black-hole binaries. The X-ray afterglow was weak and faded below the detection limit within a few hours; no optical afterglow was detected to stringent limits, explaining the past difficulty in localizing short GRBs.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 851-854 |
Number of pages | 4 |
Journal | Nature |
Volume | 437 |
Issue number | 7060 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 6 2005 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General