An enigmatic long-lasting γ-ray burst not accompanied by a bright supernova

By M. Della Valle, G. Chincarini, N. Panagia, G. Tagliaferri, D. Malesani, V. Testa, D. Fugazza, S. Campana, S. Covino, V. Mangano and 7 more. Nature, 2006

341 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are short, intense flashes of soft γ-rays coming from the distant Universe. Long-duration GRBs (those lasting more than ∼2 s) are believed to originate from the deaths of massive stars, mainly on the basis of a handful of solid associations between GRBs and supernovae. GRB 060614, one of the closest GRBs discovered, consisted of a 5-s hard spike followed by softer, brighter emission that lasted for ∼100 s (refs 8, 9). Here we report deep optical observations of GRB 060614 showing no emerging supernova with absolute visual magnitude brighter than MV = -13.7. Any supernova associated with GRB 060614 was therefore at least 100 times fainter, at optical wavelengths, than the other supernovae associated with GRBs. This demonstrates that some long-lasting GRBs can either be associated with a very faint supernova or produced by different phenomena.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bbb75a87bf69b6e5e73efb5a70fc6a38feda5ec

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. E. Berger
3. Pawan Kumar
4. E. Liang
5. B. Metzger
6. E. Nakar
7. Binbin Zhang
8. Xuefeng Wu

In Molecular Biology

1. J. Beacom
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8. J. Eldridge

Citations in the corpus

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