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Transient Optical Emission from the Error Box of the [Greek Letter Gamma]-ray Burst of 28 February 1997

Johannes van Van Paradijs

出版	Macmillan, 1997
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=x4MctwAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋

For almost a quarter of a century, the origin of [Greek letter gamma]-ray bursts- brief, energetic bursts of high-energy photons-has remained unknown. The detection of a counterpart at another wavelength has long been thought to be a key to understanding the nature of these bursts, but intensive searches have not revealed such a counterpart. The distribution and properties of the bursts are explained naturally if they lie at cosmological distances (a few Gpc), but there is a countervailing view that they are relatively local objects, perhaps distributed in a very large halo around our Galaxy. Here we report the detection of a transient and fading optical source in the error box associated with the burst GRB970228, less than 21 hours after the burst. The optical transient appears to be associated with a faint galaxy, suggesting that the burst occurred in that galaxy and thus that [Greek letter gamma]-ray bursts in general lie at cosmological distance.