Bowling Green, Ky. - Dr. Louis-Gregory Strolger, an assistant professor in Western Kentucky University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, is among the co-authors of a study on long gamma-ray bursts appearing online this week in Nature, the world’s leading scientific journal.

Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are associated with the deaths of only the most massive stars, according to the researchers who used the Hubble Space Telescope to examine the environments of 42 long-duration gamma-ray bursts and 16 supernovae.

Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute and colleagues have found that long GRBs and supernovae are statistically not found in the same galactic environments. The bursts are far more concentrated in the very brightest regions of their host galaxies than are supernovae.

The galaxies with GRBs are also fainter and more irregular than those where supernovae are seen. This evidence suggests that only the very most massive stars produce long GRBs, and that they are restricted to locations where the abundances of elements heavier than helium are much lower than in the Milky Way.
Before coming to WKU last year, Dr. Strolger worked with Fruchter at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
“For years, researchers have been trying to find out more about these energetic stellar explosions,” Dr. Strolger said. “They have been and remain a very large mystery in the field of physics and astronomy.”

More information is available online at http://www.nature.com/news/ or http://www.stsci.edu/

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For information, contact Louis-Gregory Strolger at (270) 745-6204.

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