Astronomers mostly thought that there were just two ways to produce a gamma-ray burst. GRB 211211A busts that idea.
As the weeks wore on and no supernova appeared, the researchers grew confused. Their observations revealed that whatever had made the GRB had also emitted much more optical and infrared light than is typical for the source of a long GRB.. The match was nearly perfect. “That’s when many people got convinced we were talking about a kilonova,” she says.
Now the question is, what happened? Typically, merging neutron stars collapse into a black hole almost immediately. The gamma rays come from material that is superheated as it falls into the black hole, but the material is scant, and the black hole gobbles it up within two seconds. So how did GRB 211211A keep its light going for almost a minute?
Another possibility is that a neutron star collided with a small black hole, about five times the mass of the sun, instead of another neutron star. And the process of the black hole eating the neutron star took longer., astrophysicist Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and colleagues suggest in. “We suggest a third type of progenitor, something very different from the previous two types,” he says.
Whatever its origins, GRB 211211A is a big deal for physics. “It is important because we wanted to understand, what on Earth are these events?” Kouveliotou says.
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