 |
GRB 031203 was a faint
Gamma-Ray Burst
(GRB) detected by the
European Integral satellite on December 3 2003. An X-ray
afterglow component was discovered within 1 day of discovery using the Chandra
X-ray Observatory. Comparison with optical
images
from Las Campanas Observatory (Chile) showed that the X-ray
source
was associated with a nearby galaxy just 1.5 billion light-years away.
At this distance, the gamma-ray and X-ray emission were 1000 times
fainter
than that observed for typical GRBs, located much farther away. Our radio observations with the Very Large Array (NM) showed that the radio afterglow was similarly sub-luminous and led us to infer a kinetic energy for the explosion which is 20 times smaller than that observed for typical GRBs. This discovery suggests that there exists a large population of faint GRBs that lurk in the nearby Universe and generally go undetected. |
