Bright gamma ray burst confounds models of black hole birth

Last October, following one of the brightest flashes of gamma rays ever observed in the sky, telescopes around the world captured a wealth of data from an event that is thought to herald the collapse of a massive star and the birth of a black hole.

Raffaella Margutti, associate professor of astronomy and of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that the data demonstrated that our models of such events are woefully inadequate.