Eyes in the Southern Hemisphere are turning to capture the fading glory of a gamma-ray burst that appeared on May 10. Links to 736x461-pixel, 131K GIF . Thirteen years ago, a survey by the European Southern Observatory's 1-meter Schmidt telescope showed nothing of note in the tiny patch of sky where scientists now believe they see a fading optical counterpart to the GRB 990510. The field shown measures about 6.2 arcmin wide.
North is up and East is left.
Full-size images, up to 2700 pixels wide, are available at the ESO web site . Links to 451x349-pixel, 9K GIF . Astrophysicists are eager to determine if burst sources are associated with galaxies or other objects, and to measure how they fade through optical and radio wavelengths. That Didn't Get Away - Jan. 27, 1999. For the first time, images of visible light from a cosmic explosion are captured by a robotic telescope while spectacular gamma-ray data are captured by orbiting satellites.