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Profs. Wen-fai Fong, Raffaella Margutti and Team Create First-ever Movie of Gamma-ray Burst

“Astronomers using telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) studied a cataclysmic stellar explosion known as a gamma-ray burst, or GRB, and found its enduring “afterglow.” The rebound, or reverse shock, triggered by the GRB’s powerful outflows slamming into surrounding debris, lasted thousands of times longer than expected. These observations provide fresh insights into the physics of GRBs, one of the universe’s most energetic explosions….

These observations enabled a team of astronomers, including Northwestern University astrophysicists Wen-fai Fong and Raffaella Margutti, to produce ALMA’s first-ever time-lapse movie of a cosmic explosion. The study, led by Tanmoy Laskar, a Jansky Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), appears today, July 26, in the Astrophysical Journal.”

Read the full Northwestern Now article.