Two years ago, nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, hosted a conference on the astronomical phenomenon known as gamma-ray bursts. Plenty of observational astronomers showed up, but, says Gerald Fishman, a Marshall astrophysicist, the theorists mostly stayed away. It wasn’t for lack of interest: since their discovery in the late 1960s, these brief flashes of high-energy electromagnetic radiation have been one of the enduring mysteries of astrophysics. Explaining them would qualify as a major coup.
The trouble was, nobody could figure out where the gamma-ray bursts were—in and around our Milky Way galaxy or at the far reaches of the universe. That put the theorists in the position of trying to explain something that might be either a distant mountain or a nearby molehill. No wonder they didn’t make the trip. Things were rather muddled, admits Fishman.
This September, though, when astronomers reconvened in Huntsville for a follow-up ...
