Evidence of Time Dilation Suggests Gamma Bursters are Very Far Away

The 1 April issue of The Astrophysical Journal brings news of a provocative contribution to the continuing debate about gamma‐ray bursters. Astronomers have been looking at these celestial outbursts for three decades—ever since the US military convinced itself that they were not clandestine Soviet bomb tests. But we still don’t know for sure whether the sources are local (in our Galaxy) or cosmological (billions of light‐years away). Therefore our ignorance of their intrinsic luminosities spans at least 13 orders of magnitude. The Astrophysical Journal article is a novel analysis by Jay Norris and colleagues at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the NASA Ames Research Center of data collected by the orbiting Compton Gamma Ray Observatory’s Burst and Transient Source Experiment. Though this anlysis brings strong reinforcements to the cosmological camp, no one has as yet declared victory.

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