GRB 050509B
Short duration gamma-ray burst source in constellation Coma Berenices
title: "GRB 050509B" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["short-duration-gamma-ray-bursts", "astronomical-objects-discovered-in-2005", "may-2005", "coma-berenices"] description: "Short duration gamma-ray burst source in constellation Coma Berenices" topic_path: "general/short-duration-gamma-ray-bursts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_050509B" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::summary Short duration gamma-ray burst source in constellation Coma Berenices ::
::data[format=table title="Infobox astronomical event"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| ra | |
| dec | |
| caption | Artist impression of a gamma-ray burst |
| :: |
| ra = | dec = | caption = Artist impression of a gamma-ray burst
::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/GRB050509BLocation.png" caption="The location of GRB 050509B (circled in blue)"] ::
GRB 050509B was a gamma-ray burst (GRB) observed by the NASA Swift satellite on May 9, 2005. It was the first short duration GRB for which an accurate positional measurement was made, accurate enough to locate it near to an elliptical galaxy lying at a redshift of 0.225.
The significance of this finding is that it lends support to the theory that short bursts are formed during the catastrophic merger of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole. The orbital decay (via gravitational radiation) of stellar binaries consisting of these exotic compact objects is believed to take hundreds of millions of years, hence gamma ray bursts produced this way would be expected to be in old (misleadingly called "early type") galaxies. In contrast, long-duration gamma ray bursts, which are believed to result from the collapse of a single massive star, are expected to be located preferentially in young galaxies.
References
::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::