Gamma-ray bursts: The Long and the Short of Them

 

 

The search for the origin of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) is, famously, a long story. Great strides were made in the late 1970s and 1990s in pinning down certain subclasses of the phenomena and recently, the Swift satellite finally gave the follow-up community access to an ellusive subclass --- so-called short burts. Detailed observations of the prompt high-energy emission, broadband afterglow, and host galaxies, however, betray a more complex mapping between progenitors and phenomenology than anticipated. I will review this emergent diversity and suggest that the resolution of the 'crisis of classification' of GRBs may come from drawing upon deep analogies from the supernovae field.

 

 

Joshua Bloom