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A Gamma-Ray Burst’s Split Personality: The Week Swift Fell Silent
Show notes In 2016, NASA's Swift caught a gamma-ray burst that came in two parts: a 1.7-second spike, four minutes of silence, then a 51-second burst from the same spot. A new Nature Astronomy paper finds that nearly every classification test labels the first part a merger and the second a collapsing star. It was published three days after Swift ended science operations. Also today: a black hole disc in MAXI J0637−430 that puffs up and shades itself at just a fifth of the Eddington limit; JWST finds methane in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS with a deuterium ratio of 3.18%, the highest ever…
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