Cosmological gamma-ray bursts

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Gamma-ray bursts are brief events that dominate the emission from all other gamma-ray objects in the sky, flicker for tens of seconds, and then turn off. Their nature remains uncertain despite years of efforts to understand them. One hypothesis is that the bursts arise within our galaxy albeit in an extended halo of neutron stars. Another hypothesis uses the isotropic distribution of gamma-ray bursts to argue that they come from nearly the edge of the universe. If gamma-ray bursts originate from cosmological distances, then the expansion of the universe should cause the dimmer (and presumably further) bursts to last longer. The authors have developed methods for measuring this time stretching, related the time stretching to the distance to the bursts, determined how the detailed physics causes temporal variations, and found the amount of total energy and peak luminosity that the events must be producing