Artist's illustration of a gamma-ray burst occurring in a dusty region of intense star formation. If a dust cloud lies between the burst and Earth, the optical light will be almost entirely absorbed, but the gamma-rays.
Credit: Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University, NASA Education & Public Outreach
But it means the dark bursts can't shed light on the universe's first stars, as some cosmologists had hoped.
"Based on our observations, most of these [first generation] stars were not able to produce gamma-ray bursts, which means that they (probably) were not able to strip themselves of their hydrogen layers before dying, which we think is vital for gamma-ray bursts being formed in the present universe," said Perley.
Australian astronomer Peter Tuthill, from the University of Sydney, said the result was "neat" but a "spoiler" for cosmologists because it shows that while very distant gamma ray bursts do exist, it isn't easy to find one. "It's not the big festival of light in the early universe we were hoping to train our telescopes on."
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