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Our first satellites were little more than repeater stations that propagated our radio and tv signals around the world.
But now we live in an age where a fleet of orbiting space telescopes and satellites seeks out and examines light from across the cosmos.
When a powerful burst of energy flashes elsewhere in the Universe, satellites detect it, record it, and then scientists analyze it in excruciating detail. In 2023, NASA's Fermi satellite detected a distant blast of high energy light, agamma-ray burst(GRB) from a far-off group of galaxies.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous and energetic explosions in the Universe.
They can only be generated in extreme situations. Many types of objects in the cosmos have their extreme sub-types.
Quasars are the extreme version of active galactic nuclei, for example, and hypernovae are like an extreme version of supernovae.
Neutron stars are extremely dense versions of stars, though they're more like stellar remnants. When two extremely dense neutron stars crash into each and merge, they release an enormous amount of energy as a kilonova explosion.
That generates a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), and gravitational waves.
But they do something else, too, that's very important to the Universe: they forge heavy elements like gold. The GRB detected in 2023 is named GRB 230906A.
The Chandra x-ray observatory and the Hubble teamed up to pinpoint its location and the results of those observations and analysis are in new research in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
It's titled "A Merger within a Merger: Chandra Pinpoints the Short GRB 230906A in a Peculiar Environment." The lead author is Simone Dichiara, assistant research professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University. This is the Fermi/GBM light curves of GRB 230609A in two energy bands: 8–100 keV are hard x-rays and 400–10,000 keV is gamma-rays.
The purple shaded regions highlight the first peak and the main episode.
Image Credit: Dichiara et al.
2026.
ApJL "We report the precise X-ray localization of GRB 230906A, a short-duration (T90 ∼ 0.9 s) gamma-ray burst (GRB) with no optical or radio counterpart," the researchers write.
Only the Chandra Observatory has the power to pinpoint the x-ray location, and it took deeper examination by the Hubble to reveal a faint galaxy at the position of the x-ray localization.
"Compared with standard GRB galaxies, its faintness, compact size, and color would suggest a high-redshift (z ≳ 3) host," the authors explain. But their observations didn't end there.
Next, the researchers used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) to examine the region.