Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's biggest explosions, capable of producing so much light that ground-based telescopes easily detect it billions of light-years away.

Yet, for more than a decade, astronomers have puzzled over the nature of so-called dark bursts, which produce gamma rays and X-rays but little or no visible light.

At the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, Calif., an international team of astronomers have reported surprising new insight into dark bursts. The study finds that most occur in normal galaxies detectable by large, ground-based optical telescopes.

"One possible explanation for dark bursts was that they were occurring so far away their visible light was completely extinguished," said Joshua Bloom, associate professor of astronomy at the University of California (UC), Berkeley and the study's senior author.

Thanks to the expansion of the universe and a thickening fog of hydrogen gas at increasing cosmic distances, astronomers see no visible light from objects more than about 12.9 billion light-years away. Another possibility: Dark bursts were exploding in galaxies with unusually thick amounts of interstellar dust, which absorbed a burst's light but not its higher-energy radiation.

Using one of the world's largest optical telescopes, the 10-meter Keck I in Hawaii, the team looked for unknown galaxies at the locations of 14 Swift-discovered dark bursts. "For eleven of these bursts, we found a faint, normal galaxy," said Daniel Perley, the UC Berkeley graduate student who led the study.

If these galaxies were located at extreme distances, not even the Keck telescope could see them. Most gamma-ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets - driven by processes not fully understood - punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths, including visible light.

For 11 of these 14 dark bursts, the team successfully detected a distant galaxy hosting the explosion, while the remaining three bursts without detectable hosts had faint optical counterparts. This indicates that none of these bursts had come from the most distant regions of the universe, since at distances greater than about 12.9 billion light years all the detectable light from both the afterglow and the host galaxy would be shifted into the infrared due to the expansion of the universe.

'And while 12.9 billion light years is a large distance even by most astronomers' standards, gamma-ray bursts are so powerful that if these were frequent occurrences 13 billion years ago, we ought to be detecting large numbers of those same explosions today as high redshift events," Cenko said. "We don't, which indicates that the first stars formed at a less frenzied pace than some models suggested."

The lack of any very high redshift events in the sample indicates that these distant explosions cannot comprise more than a few percent of all gamma-ray bursts, Cenko said. However, such distant bursts are known to exist. Just two months ago, a gamma-ray burst at a distance of 13.1 billion years was discovered.

"Putting this recent event together with the others in our study, for the first time we can provide both an upper and lower limit to the fraction of gamma-ray bursts at very high redshift," Perley said. Specifically, the authors conclude that the high redshift fraction is between 0.2 and 7 percent.

"Dense knots of dust in otherwise normal galaxies dim the light of a dark gamma-ray burst (center). The dust absorbs most or all of a burst's visible light but not higher-energy X-rays and gamma rays. (Credit: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet)"

Source: NASA