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SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATIONS

Visualization of gamma-ray burst

Modeling Gamma-Ray Bursts in Massive Stars

A jet erupts from the surface of a massive star about 9 seconds after the star's collapse. A classical gamma-ray burst results from a hyper-relativistic jet blasted out of a massive star. Such a burst might be visible to an observer sitting inside about a 5-degree opening angle of the blue core of the jet here, but a variety of lower-energy transients would be produced at larger angles by the ejecta running into circumstellar material.

Credit: Research led by Stan Woosley, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Weiqun Zhang, Stanford University.

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