7. What's making these gamma rays?
Mysterious, monstrously powerful and persnickety... Nothing drives an astrophysicist bonkers quite like a gamma-ray burst. For a few seconds, these units blaze like 100 million billion suns, and then they just go bye-bye. Hubble doesn't do (measure) gamma rays, but it did capture the fading light that followed one burst, located about two-thirds of the way across the universe.
The distorted galaxy around the gamma-ray source indicates that the galaxy may have collided with another one. The gamma ray burst, however, may have been produced by a merger of two neutron stars or even a couple of black holes. One more clue: bright blue light emitted in the area indicates intense star formation, stimulated perhaps by a shock wave from the suspected source of the gamma ray burst.
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