By Ron Cowen
Just before 10 p.m. EDT, last Sept. 3, Dan Reichart’s cell phone started playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” A fitting tune, since it was heralding a call from the heavens. Reichart’s phone was signaling that a detector on NASA’s Swift satellite had registered a gamma-ray burst, the most powerful type of explosion in the universe. Such bursts—none of which lasts longer than a few minutes—typically mark the violent death of a massive star as it collapses to become a black hole.
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Since its launch in late 2004, the Swift satellite has recorded more than 100 gamma-ray bursts. About 20 other detections have turned out to be spurious. Reichart, an astronomer based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, didn’t want to miss an opportunity to find the new burst’s afterglow. With most of his team at a seminar on a remote island in Greece, Reichart immediately contacted his only available student, undergraduate Josh Haislip. They needed to take control of several mountaintop telescopes in Chile within 3 hours. That’s when the afterglow, deep in the constellation Pisces, would lie directly overhead in the southern night sky, and detectors would have their best view.