Caught red-handed

THE link between mysterious gamma-ray bursts and huge supernova explosions has been pinned down. A team led by Kris Stanek at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, watched the afterglow of Gamma-Ray Burst 011121 in November 2001. In a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, the researchers say the afterglow faded quickly over several hours but then brightened a couple of weeks later before fading again. This is what you’d expect if the burst was part of a giant supernova. “We were thrilled to be the first to catch a supernova ‘in the act’,” says Stanek.