Fact Sheet
Gamma-Ray Burst
With help from Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers captured the first image of a visible fireball accompanying a gamma-ray burst, shown as a white blob in this composite, false-color image. When other orbiting observatories tuned to X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths detected the burst in March, Hubble operators turned the space telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera toward the region of the sky in hopes of catching a glimpse of the fleeting phenomenon. The image strengthens the theory that high-energy gamma-ray bursts occur in distant galaxies, rather than in our own Milky Way. Scientists believe the brighter region extending to the lower right of the burst (roughly shaped like an “E”) is the galaxy in which the burst occurred. (NASA/STScI)
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