NEWSNOTES Supernova Poses
Gamma-Ray-Burst Puzzle
Cosmic gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) are the biggest puz-
zle in modern astronomy, and they are proving stubborn in-
deed about yielding up their secrets. Satellites detect about one
of these high-energy flashes per day; they typically last from
less than a second to a few minutes. In the past 18 months the
precise locations of a few of them have been pinpointed on the
sky by their faint visible and/or radio afterglows. This has en-
abled astronomers to establish that GRBs are fantastically dis-
tant as much as 10 or 12 billion light-years away near the
edge of the observable universe in at least some cases.
One theory has GRBs resulting from two neutron stars spi-
raling together, or from a neutron star spiraling into a black
hole (February issue cover story). But the well-observed burst
last December 14th was so powerful that even this mechanism
might not be able to supply enough energy (July issue, page 18).
A newer theory has the bursts arising when the core of a
very massive, rapidly spinning star collapses to become a 10-
solar-mass black hole in a supernova explosion. Ordinary su-
pernova cores collapse to become neutron stars, which have
less than about 3 solar masses. If you give the core enough
mass, enough spin, and a strong enough magnetic field all
of which seem plausible you can extract a strong enough
burst. If most of the rest of the star has already disappeared
into a spinning black hole by way of its poles, a dense, equato-
rial disk or doughnut of material could do the bursting in
plain view. Bohdan Paczynski (Princeton University) has
named such events hypernovae. They would be about 10,000
to 100,000 times rarer than ordinary supernovae, and perhaps
100 times brighter at visible wavelengths.
Which theory might be right? One way to tell is by finding
out where gamma-ray bursts occur in their host galaxies as-
suming they have host galaxies at all. Massive stars have very
short lives, so they will explode in star-forming regions. Most
merging neutron stars would be very old and would have trav-
eled far from their birthplaces, so they would show no such
tendency.
For the handful of gamma-ray bursts that have yielded posi-
tions accurate to better than an arcsecond, the underlying
galaxies have proved to be extremely faint typically about
24th magnitude when they can be detected at all. Some
A Gravity Boost for Keck
You might think a 10-meter telescope would be big enough for
the routine task of obtaining a stars spectrum. But when that
star is a 19th-magnitude mote, every photon counts. Thats
why Dante Minniti (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
and four colleagues are lucky that an otherwise unseen object
happened to skirt their sightline to an undesignated main-se-
quence star in our Milky Ways bulge. As Minnitis team reports
in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, the in-
terlopers gravity focused the bulge stars light, nearly tripling
its intensity as seen on Earth. This temporarily turned the
Keck I reflector into a the equivalent of a 16 -meter telescope,
enabling the team to measure the stars lithium content an
important chemical clue to our galaxys history.
24 September 1998 Sky & Telescope 1998 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
ESO
Supernova 1998bw (arrowed) expanding at close to the speed of light
in the spiral arm of a far-southern galaxy. Was it the source of the
April 25th gamma-ray burst? This visual/infrared composite-color im-
age was taken on May 4th with the European Southern Observatorys
3.6-meter New Technology Telescope.
rather weak evidence suggests that the bursts do happen in
star-forming areas within them, as Paczynski writes in the Feb-
ruary 10th Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The case for hypernovae suddenly seemed to become much
stronger on April 25th, when a 40-second gamma-ray burst
was pinned down with arcminute accuracy near the barred
spiral galaxy ESO 184-G82. This galaxy is only about 140 mil-
lion light-years away in the southern constellation Telescopi-
um. When astronomers looked, a very unusual supernova
proved to be under way in one of the galaxys spiral arms. It
was the most radio-luminous supernova ever seen, though at
14th magnitude its visible-light output was rather ordinary.
The characteristics of the radio emission seemed to require
some material to be expanding at 99 percent of the speed of
light (300,000 kilometers per second), compared to typical su-
pernova expansion rates of 10,000 or 20,000 km per second.
And it had an unusual visible-light spectrum to boot.
But the supernovas position turned out to be slightly
wrong! It seemed to be a fluke coincidence unrelated to the
gamma-ray burst, or at least to the fading X-ray afterglow by
which the burst location was supposedly fixed. (Only by its X-
ray afterglow can a gamma-ray burst be located to arcminute
precision.)
Astronomers had a hard time buying it. Such a coincidence
was estimated to be a literally one-in-a-million chance. Wasnt
it more likely that something was slightly wrong with the X-
ray position? No one could find a problem with it. Or was the
fading X-ray glow an unrelated red herring, and the supernova
the real gamma-ray source after all?
Nobody knows the answer, says Paczynski. There are
good reasons in favor of and against each of the two possibili-
ties. In either case, this is a very unusual supernova and it
demonstrates that the diversity of explosions in the universe is
much richer than we thought. And it demonstrates what a
tough nut to crack gamma-ray bursts are going to be.