Physics – Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
Nov 1997
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997aps..dpphtut03l&link_type=abstract
American Physical Society, Division of Plasma Physics Meeting, November 17-21, 1997, abstract #hTupT03.
Physics
Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
The nature of gamma-ray bursts has been one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in astrophysics for more than a quarter century. A major reason for this is that no definite counterparts to the bursts could be found at other wavelengths, despite intense efforts spanning more than two decades. Consequently, the study of gamma-ray bursts has been isolated from the rest of astronomy. Scientists studying them have had only the laws of physics and the bursts themselves to guide them in attempting to solve the burst mystery. All of this changed dramatically with the discovery earlier this year of fading X-ray and optical sources in the arcminute-sized positional error boxes of several gamma-ray bursts. For the first time, temporal, as well as spatial, coincidence could be used to associate these X-ray and optical sources with the gamma-ray bursts. As a result, the odds are great that the fading X-ray and optical sources are counterparts of the bursts, and that the study of gamma-ray bursts has finally been connected with the rest of astronomy. In this talk, we describe the dramatic new information about the nature of gamma-ray bursts that the X-ray, optical, and radio observations of the fading sources have provided, and emphasize the implications that this information has for the distance scale to the bursts.
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