Massive space explosion observed creating elements needed for life

Scientists have observed the creation of rare chemical elements in the second-brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen -- casting new light on how heavy elements are made.

Researchers examined the exceptionally bright gamma-ray burst GRB 230307A, which was caused by a neutron star merger. The explosion was observed using an array of ground and space-based telescopes, including NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

Publishing their findings today in Nature (25 Oct), the international research team which included experts from the University of Birmingham, reveal that they found the heavy chemical element tellurium, in the aftermath of the explosion.

Other elements such as iodine and thorium, which are needed to sustain life on earth, are also likely to be amongst the material ejected by the explosion, also known as a kilonova.

Dr Ben Gompertz, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, and co-author of the study explains: "Gamma-ray bursts come from powerful jets travelling at almost the speed of light -- in this case driven by a collision between two neutron stars. These stars spent several billion years spiralling towards one another before colliding to produce the gamma-ray burst we observed in March this year. The merger site is the approximate length of the Milky Way (about 120,000 light-years) outside of their home galaxy, meaning they must have been launched out together.

"Colliding neutron stars provide the conditions needed to synthesise very heavy elements, and the radioactive glow of these new elements powered the kilonova we detected as the blast faded. Kilonovae are extremely rare and very difficult to observe and study, which is why this discovery is so exciting."

GRB 230307A was one of the brightest gamma-ray bursts ever observed -- over a million times brighter than the entire Milky Way Galaxy combined. This is the second time individual heavy elements have been detected using spectroscopic observations after a neutron star merger, providing invaluable insight into how these vital building blocks needed for life are formed.

Lead author of the study Andrew Levan, Professor of Astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said: "Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote down the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in the position to start filling in those last blanks of understanding where everything was made, thanks to the James Webb Telescope."

GRB 230307A lasted for 200 seconds, meaning it is categorised as a long-duration gamma-ray burst. This is unusual as short gamma-ray bursts, which last less than two seconds, are more commonly caused by neutron star mergers. Long gamma-ray bursts like this one are usually caused by the explosive death of a massive star.

The researchers are now seeking to learn more about how these neutron star mergers work and how they power these huge element-generating explosions.

Dr Samantha Oates, a co-author of the study while a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham (now a lecturer at Lancaster University) said: "Just a few short years ago discoveries like this one would not have been possible, but thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope we can observe these mergers in exquisite detail."

Read more at Science Daily

Unprecedented gamma-ray burst explained by long-lived jet

Last year, Northwestern University researchers reported new observational evidence that long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can result from the merger of a neutron star with another compact object (either another neutron star or black hole) -- a finding that was previously believed to be impossible.

Now, another Northwestern team offers a potential explanation for what generated the unprecedented and incredibly luminous burst of light.

After developing the first numerical simulation that follows the jet evolution in a black hole-neutron star merger out to large distances, the astrophysicists discovered that the post-merger black hole can launch jets of material from the swallowed neutron star.

But the key ingredients are the mass of the violent whirlpool of gas (or accretion disk) surrounding the black hole and the strength of the disk's magnetic field. In massive disks, when the magnetic field is strong, the black hole launches a short-duration jet that is much brighter than anything ever seen in observations. When the massive disk has a weaker magnetic field, however, the black hole launches a jet with the same luminosity and long duration as the mysterious GRB (dubbed GRB211211A) spotted in 2021 and reported in 2022.

Not only does the new discovery help explain the origins of long GRBs, it also gives insight into the nature and physics of black holes, their magnetic fields and accretion disks.

The study will be published Thursday (Aug. 31) in the Astrophysical Journal.

"So far, no one else has developed any numerical works or simulations that consistently follow a jet from the compact-object merger to the formation of the jet and its large-scale evolution," said Northwestern's Ore Gottlieb, who co-led the work. "The motivation for our work was to do this for the first time. And what we found just so happened to match observations of GRB211211A."

"Neutron-star mergers are a captivating multi-messenger phenomena, which result in both gravitational and electromagnetic waves," said Northwestern's Danat Issa, who co-led the work with Gottlieb. "However, simulating these events poses a challenge due to the vast spatial and temporal scale separations involved as well as the diverse physics operating across these scales. For the first time, we have succeeded in comprehensively modeling the entire sequence of the neutron star merger process."

During the research, Gottlieb was a CIERA Fellow at Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA); now he is a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics. Issa is a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and member of CIERA. Issa is advised by paper co-author Alexander Tchekhovskoy, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Weinberg and member of CIERA.

Curious kilonova

When astronomers first spotted GRB211211A in December 2021, they initially assumed that the 50-second-long event was generated from the collapse of a massive star. But, as they examined the long GRB's late-time emission, called the afterglow, they uncovered evidence of a kilonova, a rare event that only occurs after the merger of a neutron star with another compact object.

The finding (published in Nature in December 2022) upended the long-established, long-accepted belief that only supernovae could generate long GRBs.

"GRB 211211A reignited interest in the origin of long-duration GRBs that are not associated with massive stars, but likely originating from compact binary mergers," Gottlieb said.

From pre-merger to long GRB

To further reveal what occurs during compact-merger events, Gottlieb, Issa and their collaborators sought to simulate the whole process -- from before the merger all the way through to the end of the GRB event, when the GRB-producing jets shut off. Because it is such an incredibly computationally expensive feat, the entire scenario had never been modeled before. Gottlieb and Issa overcame that challenge by dividing the scenario into two simulations.

First, the researchers ran a simulation of the pre-merger phase. Then, they took the output from the first simulation and plugged it into the post-merger simulation.

"Because the space-time used by the two simulations is different, this remap was not as straightforward as we had hoped, but Danat figured it out," Tchekhovskoy said.

"The daisy chaining of the two simulations allowed us to make the computation much less expensive," Gottlieb said. "The physics is very complicated in the pre-merger stage because there are two objects. It gets much simpler after the pre-merger because there is only one black hole."

In the simulation, the compact objects first merged to create a more massive black hole. The black hole's intense gravity pulled the now-destroyed neutron star's debris toward it. Before the debris fell into the black hole, some of the debris first swirled around the black hole as an accretion disk. In the configuration studied, the emerging disk was particularly massive with one-tenth the mass of our sun. Then, when the mass fell into the black hole from the disk, it powered the black hole to launch a jet that accelerated to near light speed.

Disk properties matter

A surprise emerged as the researchers adjusted the strength of the massive disk's magnetic field. Whereas a strong magnetic field resulted in a short, incredibly bright GRB, a weak magnetic field generated a jet that matched observations of long GRBs.

"The stronger the magnetic field, the shorter is its lifetime," Gottlieb said. "Weak magnetic fields produce weaker jets that the newly formed black hole can sustain for a longer time. A key ingredient here is the massive disk that can maintain, together with weak magnetic fields, a GRB consistent with observations and comparable to the luminosity and long duration of GRB211211A. Although we found this specific binary system to give rise to a long GRB, we also expect that other binary mergers that produce massive disks will lead to a similar outcome. It's simply a question of the post-merger disk mass."

Of course, "long" is relative in this scenario. GRBs are divided into two classes. GRBs with durations less than two seconds are considered short. If a GRB is two seconds or longer, then it's considered long. Even events this brief are still exceptionally difficult to model.

"A major portion of this disk material ultimately gets consumed by the black hole, with the whole process lasting mere seconds," Issa said. "Here lies the main challenge: It is very difficult to capture the evolution of these mergers, using simulations on supercomputers, over a span of several seconds."

Read more at Science Daily

Brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed reveals new mysteries of cosmic explosions

On October 9, 2022, an intense pulse of gamma-ray radiation swept through our solar system, overwhelming gamma-ray detectors on numerous orbiting satellites, and sending astronomers on a chase to study the event using the most powerful telescopes in the world.

The new source, dubbed GRB 221009A for its discovery date, turned out to be the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded.

In a new study that appears today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, observations of GRB 221009A spanning from radio waves to gamma-rays, including critical millimeter-wave observations with the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, shed new light on the decades-long quest to understand the origin of these extreme cosmic explosions.

The gamma-ray emission from GRB 221009A lasted over 300 seconds. Astronomers think that such "long-duration" GRBs are the birth cry of a black hole, formed as the core of a massive and rapidly spinning star collapses under its own weight. The newborn black hole launches powerful jets of plasma at near the speed of light, which pierce through the collapsing star and shine in gamma-rays.

With GRB 221009A being the brightest burst ever recorded, a real mystery lay in what would come after the initial burst of gamma-rays. "As the jets slam into gas surrounding the dying star, they produce a bright `afterglow' of light across the entire spectrum," says Tanmoy Laskar, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah, and lead author of the study. "The afterglow fades quite rapidly, which means we have to be quick and nimble in capturing the light before it disappears, taking its secrets with it."

As part of a campaign to use the world's best radio and millimeter telescopes to study the afterglow of GRB 221009A, astronomers Edo Berger and Yvette Cendes of the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) rapidly gathered data with the SMA.

"This burst, being so bright, provided a unique opportunity to explore the detailed behavior and evolution of an afterglow with unprecedented detail -- we did not want to miss it!" says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the CfA. "I have been studying these events for more than twenty years, and this one was as exciting as the first GRB I ever observed."

"Thanks to its rapid-response capability, we were able to quickly turn the SMA to the location of GRB 221009A," says SMA project scientist and CfA researcher Garrett Keating. "The team was excited to see just how bright the afterglow of this GRB was, which we were able to continue to monitor for more than 10 days as it faded."

After analyzing and combining the data from the SMA and other telescopes all over the world, the astronomers were flummoxed: the millimeter and radio wave measurements were much brighter than expected based on the visible and X-ray light.

"This is one of the most detailed datasets we have ever collected, and it is clear that the millimeter and radio data just don't behave as expected," says CfA research associate Yvette Cendes. "A few GRBs in the past have shown a brief excess of millimeter and radio emission that is thought to be the signature of a shockwave in the jet itself, but in GRB 221009A the excess emission behaves quite differently than in these past cases."

She adds, "It is likely that we have discovered a completely new mechanism to produce excess millimeter and radio waves."

One possibility, says Cendes, is that the powerful jet produced by GRB 221009A is more complex than in most GRBs. "It is possible that the visible and X-ray light are produced by one portion of the jet, while the early millimeter and radio waves are produced by a different component."

"Luckily, this afterglow is so bright that we will continue to study its radio emission for months and maybe years to come," adds Berger. "With this much longer time span we hope to decipher the mysterious origin of the early excess emission."

Independent of the exact details of this particular GRB, the ability to respond rapidly to GRBs and similar events with millimeter-wave telescopes is an essential new capability for astronomers.

Read more at Science Daily

NASA missions probe game-changing cosmic explosion

On Dec. 11, 2021, NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a blast of high-energy light from the outskirts of a galaxy around 1 billion light-years away. The event has rattled scientists' understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful events in the universe.

For the last few decades, astronomers have generally divided GRBs into two categories. Long bursts emit gamma rays for two seconds or more and originate from the formation of dense objects like black holes in the centers of massive collapsing stars. Short bursts emit gamma rays for less than two seconds and are caused by mergers of dense objects like neutron stars. Scientists sometimes observe short bursts with a following flare of visible and infrared light called a kilonova.

"This burst, named GRB 211211A, was paradigm-shifting as it is the first long-duration gamma-ray burst traced to a neutron star merger origin," said Jillian Rastinejad, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who led one team that studied the burst. "The high-energy burst lasted about a minute, and our follow-up observations led to the identification of a kilonova. This discovery has deep implications for how the universe's heavy elements came to be."

A classic short gamma-ray burst begins with two orbiting neutron stars, the crushed remnants of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. As the stars circle ever closer, they strip neutron-rich material from each other. They also generate gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time -- although none were detected from this event.

Eventually the neutron stars collide and merge, creating a cloud of hot debris emitting light across multiple wavelengths. Scientists hypothesize that jets of high-speed particles, launched by the merger, produce the initial gamma-ray flare before they collide with the wreckage. Heat generated by the radioactive decay of elements in the neutron-rich debris likely creates the kilonova's visible and infrared light. This decay results in the production of heavy elements like gold and platinum.

"Many years ago, Neil Gehrels, an astrophysicist and Swift's namesake, suggested that neutron star mergers could produce some long bursts," said Eleonora Troja, an astrophysicist at the University of Rome who led another team that studied the burst. "The kilonova we observed is the proof that connects mergers to these long-duration events, forcing us to rethink how black holes are formed."

Fermi and Swift detected the burst simultaneously, and Swift was able to rapidly identify its location in the constellation Boötes, enabling other facilities to quickly respond with follow-up observations. Their observations have provided the earliest look yet at the first stages of a kilonova.

Many research groups have delved into the observations collected by Swift, Fermi, the Hubble Space Telescope, and others. Some have suggested the burst's oddities could be explained by the merger of a neutron star with another massive object, like a black hole. The event was also relatively nearby, by gamma-ray burst standards, which may have allowed telescopes to catch the kilonova's fainter light. Perhaps some distant long bursts could also produce kilonovae, but we haven't been able to see them.

The light following the burst, called the afterglow emission, also exhibited unusual features. Fermi detected high-energy gamma rays starting 1.5 hours post-burst and lasting more than 2 hours. These gamma rays reached energies of up to 1 billion electron volts. (Visible light's energy measures between about 2 and 3 electron volts, for comparison.)

"This is the first time we've seen such an excess of high-energy gamma rays in the afterglow of a merger event. Normally that emission decreases over time," said Alessio Mei, a doctoral candidate at the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L'Aquila, Italy, who led a group that studied the data. "It's possible these high-energy gamma rays come from collisions between visible light from the kilonova and electrons in particle jets. The jets could be weakening ones from the original explosion or new ones powered by the resulting black hole or magnetar."

Scientists think neutron star mergers are a major source of the universe's heavy elements. They based their estimates on the rate of short bursts thought to occur across the cosmos. Now they'll need to factor long bursts into their calculations as well.

A team led by Benjamin Gompertz, an astrophysicist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, looked at the entire high-energy light curve, or the evolution of the event's brightness over time. The scientists noted features that might provide a key for identifying similar incidents -- long bursts from mergers -- in the future, even ones that are dimmer or more distant. The more astronomers can find, the more they can refine their understanding of this new class of phenomena.

On Dec. 7, 2022, papers led by Rastinejad, Troja, and Mei were published in the scientific journal Nature, and a paper led by Gompertz was published in Nature Astronomy.

"This result underscores the importance of our missions working together and with others to provide multiwavelength follow up of these kinds of phenomenon," said Regina Caputo, Swift project scientist, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Similar coordinated efforts have hinted that some supernovae might produce short bursts, but this event is the final nail in the coffin for the simple dichotomy we've used for years. You never know when you might find something surprising."

Read more at Science Daily

Short gamma-ray bursts traced farther into distant universe

A Northwestern University-led team of astronomers has developed the most extensive inventory to date of the galaxies where short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) originate.

Using several highly sensitive instruments and sophisticated galaxy modeling, the researchers pinpointed the galactic homes of 84 SGRBs and probed the characteristics of 69 of the identified host galaxies. Among their findings, they discovered that about 85% of the studied SGRBs come from young, actively star-forming galaxies.

The astronomers also found that more SGRBs occurred at earlier times, when the universe was much younger -- and with greater distances from their host galaxies' centers -- than previously known. Surprisingly, several SGRBs were spotted far outside their host galaxies -- as if they were "kicked out," a finding that raises questions as to how they were able to travel so far away.

"This is the largest catalog of SGRB host galaxies to ever exist, so weexpect it to be the gold standard for many years to come," said Anya Nugent, a Northwestern graduate student who led the study focused on modeling host galaxies. "Building this catalog and finally having enough host galaxies to see patterns and draw significant conclusions is exactly what the field needed to push our understanding of these fantastic events and what happens to stars after they die."

The team will publish two papers, detailing the new catalog. Both papers will publish on Monday, Nov. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal. Because SGRBs are among the brightest explosions in the universe, the team calls its catalog BRIGHT (Broadband Repository for Investigating Gamma-ray burst Host Traits). All of BRIGHT's data and modeling products are publicly available online for community use.

Nugent is a graduate student in physics and astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She is advised by Wen-fai Fong, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Weinberg and a key member of CIERA, who led a second study focused on SGRB host observations.

Benchmark for future comparisons

When two neutron stars collide, they generate momentary flashes of intense gamma-ray light, known as SGRBs. While the gamma rays last mere seconds, the optical light can continue for hours before fading below detection levels (an event called an afterglow). SGRBs are some of the most luminous explosions in the universe with, at most, a dozen detected and pinpointed each year. They currently represent the only way to study and understand a large population of merging neutron star systems.

Since NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory first discovered an SGRB afterglow in 2005, astronomers have spent the last 17 years trying to understand which galaxies produce these powerful bursts. Stars within a galaxy can give insight into the environmental conditions needed to produce SGRBs and can connect the mysterious bursts to their neutron-star merger origins. So far, only one SGRB (GRB 170817A) has a confirmed neutron-star merger origin -- as it was detected just seconds after gravitational wave detectors observed the binary neutron-star merger (GW170817).

"In a decade, the next generation of gravitational wave observatories will be able to detect neutron star mergers out to the same distances as we do SGRBs today," Fong said. "Thus, our catalog will serve as a benchmark for comparison to future detections of neutron star mergers."

"The catalog can really make impacts beyond just a single class of transients like SGRBs," said Yuxin "Vic" Dong, study co-author and astrophysics Ph.D. student at Northwestern. "With the wealth of data and results presented in the catalog, I believe a variety of research projects will make use of it, maybe even in ways we have yet not thought of."

Insight into neutron-star systems

To create the catalog, the researchers used several highly sensitive instruments at W.M. Keck Observatory, the Gemini Observatories, the MMT Observatory, the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory and the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory to capture deep imaging and spectroscopy of some of the faintest galaxies identified in the survey of SGRB hosts. The team also used data from two of NASA's Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.

Prior to these new studies, astronomers characterized host galaxies from only a couple dozen SGRBs. The new catalog is quadruple the number of existing samples. With the advantage of a much larger dataset, the catalog shows that SGRB host galaxies can be either young and star-forming or old and approaching death. This means neutron-star systems form in a broad range of environments and many of them have quick formation-to-merger timescales. Because neutron-star mergers create heavy elements like gold and platinum, the catalog's data also will deepen scientists' understanding of when precious metals were first created in the universe.

"We suspect that the younger SGRBs we found in younger host galaxies come from binary stellar systems that formed in a star formation 'burst' and are so tightly bound that they can merge very fast," Nugent said. "Long-standing theories have suggested there must be ways to merge neutron stars quickly, but, until now, we have not been able to witness them. We find evidence for older SGRBs in the galaxies that are much older and believe the stars in those galaxies either took a longer time to form a binary or were a binary system that was further separated. Hence, those took longer to merge."

Potential of JWST

With the ability to detect the faintest host galaxies from very early times in the universe, NASA's new infrared flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is poised to further advance the understanding of neutron star mergers and how far back in time they began.

"I'm most excited about the possibility of using JWST to probe deeper into the homes of these rare, explosive events," Nugent said. "JWST's ability to observe faint galaxies in the universe could uncover more SGRB host galaxies that are currently evading detection, perhaps even revealing a missing population and a link to the early universe."

"I started observations for this project 10 years ago, and it was so gratifying to be able to pass the torch onto the next generation of researchers," Fong said. "It is one of my career's greatest joys to see years of work come to life in this catalog, thanks to the young researchers who really took this study to the next level."

Read more at Science Daily

Out with a bang: Explosive neutron star merger captured for the first time in millimeter light

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) -- an international observatory co-operated by the US National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) -- have for the first time recorded millimeter-wavelength light from a fiery explosion caused by the merger of a neutron star with another star. The team also confirmed this flash of light to be one of the most energetic short-duration gamma-ray bursts ever observed, leaving behind one of the most luminous afterglows on record. The results of the research will be published in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the brightest and most energetic explosions in the Universe, capable of emitting more energy in a matter of seconds than our Sun will emit during its entire lifetime. GRB 211106A belongs to a GRB sub-class known as short-duration gamma-ray bursts. These explosions -- which scientists believe are responsible for the creation of the heaviest elements in the Universe, such as platinum and gold -- result from the catastrophic merger of binary star systems containing a neutron star. "These mergers occur because of gravitational wave radiation that removes energy from the orbit of the binary stars, causing the stars to spiral in toward each other," said Tanmoy Laskar, who will soon commence work as an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah. "The resulting explosion is accompanied by jets moving at close to the speed of light. When one of these jets is pointed at Earth, we observe a short pulse of gamma-ray radiation or a short-duration GRB."

A short-duration GRB usually lasts only a few tenths of a second. Scientists then look for an afterglow, an emission of light caused by the interaction of the jets with surrounding gas. Even still, they're difficult to detect; only half-a-dozen short-duration GRBs have been detected at radio wavelengths, and until now none had been detected in millimeter wavelengths. Laskar, who led the research while an Excellence Fellow at Radboud University in The Netherlands, said that the difficulty is the immense distance to GRBs, and the technological capabilities of telescopes. "Short-duration GRB afterglows are very luminous and energetic. But these explosions take place in distant galaxies which means the light from them can be quite faint for our telescopes on Earth. Before ALMA, millimeter telescopes were not sensitive enough to detect these afterglows."

At roughly 20 billion light-years from Earth, GRB 211106A is no exception. The light from this short-duration gamma-ray burst was so faint that while early X-ray observations with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory saw the explosion, the host galaxy was undetectable at that wavelength, and scientists weren't able to determine exactly where the explosion was coming from. "Afterglow light is essential for figuring out which galaxy a burst comes from and for learning more about the burst itself. Initially, when only the X-ray counterpart had been discovered, astronomers thought that this burst might be coming from a nearby galaxy," said Laskar, adding that a significant amount of dust in the area also obscured the object from detection in optical observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Each wavelength added a new dimension to scientists' understanding of the GRB, and millimeter, in particular, was critical to uncovering the truth about the burst. "The Hubble observations revealed an unchanging field of galaxies. ALMA's unparalleled sensitivity allowed us to pinpoint the location of the GRB in that field with more precision, and it turned out to be in another faint galaxy, which is further away. That, in turn, means that this short-duration gamma-ray burst is even more powerful than we first thought, making it one of the most luminous and energetic on record," said Laskar.

Wen-fai Fong, an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University added, "This short gamma-ray burst was the first time we tried to observe such an event with ALMA. Afterglows for short bursts are very difficult to come by, so it was spectacular to catch this event shining so bright. After many years of observing these bursts, this surprising discovery opens up a new area of study, as it motivates us to observe many more of these with ALMA, and other telescope arrays, in the future."

Joe Pesce, National Science Foundation Program Officer for NRAO/ALMA said, "These observations are fantastic on many levels. They provide more information to help us understand the enigmatic gamma-ray bursts (and neutron-star astrophysics in general), and they demonstrate how important and complementary multi-wavelength observations with space- and ground-based telescopes are in understanding astrophysical phenomena."

And there's plenty of work still to be done across multiple wavelengths, both with new GRBs and with GRB 211106A, which could uncover additional surprises about these bursts. "The study of short-duration GRBs requires the rapid coordination of telescopes around the world and in space, operating at all wavelengths," said Edo Berger, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. "In the case of GRB 211106A, we used some of the most powerful telescopes available -- ALMA, the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope. With the now-operational James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and future 20-40 meter optical and radio telescopes such as the next generation VLA (ngVLA) we will be able to produce a complete picture of these cataclysmic events and study them at unprecedented distances."

Read more at Science Daily