Another Gamma-Ray

Burst Gauged
A Caltech-led consortium of astronomers
has found what appear to be visible-light
and radio-wave manifestations of yet another gamma-ray burst, or GRB. Shortly
after being detected by spacecraft, the
July 3rd shower of high-energy photons
was traced to a spot in the constellation
Pisces. A fading point of light in the same
part of the sky was then tracked with the
Keck II telescope, ultimately yielding the
spectrum of a star-forming galaxy billions
of light-years away (its redshift is 0.97).
This gives some support to the models
which associate origins of GRBs with massive star formation, suggests S. George
Djorgovski (Caltech) in a July 8th posting
on the Internet-based GRB Coordination
Network (http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/). A
subsequent posting by Dale A. Frail (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) stated that the Very Large Array (VLA) had
identified a flickering source of radio
waves in the same position. Continued
monitoring by the VLA may eventually
determine the size and expansion speed
of the GRB fireball (S&T: December 1997,
page 17).

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A Possible Planet in
Hercules
Astronomers searching for planets around
other stars or seeking to understand
those already found gathered in July in
Santa Barbara, California, where Michel
Mayor (Geneva Observatory) described
the latest extrasolar planet. According to
Mayor and his colleagues, 14 Herculis
(Gliese 614) a 6.7-magnitude K star 59
light-years distant is orbited every 4.4
Earth years by an unseen object that
ranges from 1.6 to 3.4 astronomical units
from the parent star. The objects existence was deduced from the cyclic reflex
motions it induces in 14 Herculis; these
motions were monitored for several years
from Haute Provence Observatory. Even
though the companion must have at least
3.3 times the mass of Jupiter, it cannot be
seen against the glare of its parent star, at
least in ground-based images taken by
the discoverers with an adaptive -optics
camera on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. This bolsters the discoverers confidence that the star is attended by a bona
fide planet, not a very dim star or substellar brown dwarf.
1998 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope October 1998

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