A Coincidence of Cosmic Proportions

Talk about luck. Twelve billion light years after a gamma ray burst exploded with Big Bang-like force, Dartmouth astronomy professor John Thorstensen happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture the cosmic event on camera.

The right place was the helm of a telescope at the MDM Observatory at Kitt Peak, Arizona, a long-time Dartmouth research station and astronomical rapid-response site. The right time was last December 14, just hours after two satellites detected the high-energy gamma ray flash in space. A Columbia University colleague alerted Thorstensen and urged him to aimMDM's telescope and computer camera at a particular patch of night sky. When the night's photographs revealed nothing out of the ordinary, colleagues urged Thorstensen to repeat the telescopic photo sessions the next night. And, he says, when he compared the images from those two nights, "Bang, there it was."

Though in photographs the gamma ray burst looks no bigger than the head of a large pin, the radiation has made large waves in the scientific community. As Thorstensen explains, gamma ray bursts were first detected in the 1960s by U.S. satellites policing nuclear test-ban treaties, but they were kept secret for years because the government didn't want to reveal what the satellites were doing. In the 1970s the existence of gamma ray bursts was made public, but the flashes remained elusive. "There must have been uncounted gazillions of these things since the Big Bang. We just didn't observe them," says Thorstensen. And until GR8971214 that's Gamma Ray Burst from December 14, 1997—scientists had been unable to establish how far away the sources of the bursts were. Thorstensen and 16 other scientists who have been studying GRB 971214 published their findings in the May 7 issue of the journal Nature.

Thorstensen's pictures may be worth a thousand scientific words, but they don't reveal everything. According to the astronomer, no one knows yet exactly why the bursts happen or precisely what they mean.

Although John Thorsterisen does his research at Kitt Peak, he makes time to scan the night skies from Shattuck Observatory. Inset: The circle in the center is the gamma ray burst as recorded by an electronic camera.