| Author: J. J. Brainerd | Date: April 7, 1997 |
Gamma-ray bursts are brilliant flashes of gamma-rays lasting from several milliseconds to over one thousand seconds. While these events have been observed since 1967, their origin and their distance are still unknown.
A pivotal event in the study of gamma-ray bursts occurred in 1991 with the launch of the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO). One experiment on this satellite, the Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE), observed that gamma-ray bursts are not confined to the galactic plane, as predicted by theory, but are isotropically distributed. This forced the development of new gamma-ray burst theories, and ignited addition observational research on gamma-ray burst counterparts and on methods to determine their distance, particularly on methods to test whether gamma-ray bursts are from the most distant objects in the universe.
The current sky map still shows that gamma-ray bursts are uniformly distributed on the sky.
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