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Piro, L.; Garmire, G.; Garcia, M.; Stratta, G.; Costa, E.; Feroci, M.; Mészáros, P.; Vietri, M.; Bradt, H.; Frail, D.; Frontera, F.; Halpern, J.; Heise, J.; Hurley, K.; Kawai, N.; Kippen, R. M.; Marshall, F.; Murakami, T.; Sokolov, V. V.; Takeshima, T.; Yoshida, A.
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 11/2000, Volume: 290, Issue: 5493Journal Article
We report on the discovery of two emission features observed in the x-ray spectrum of the afterglow of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) of 16 December 1999 by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. These features are identified with the Lyαline and the narrow recombination continuum by hydrogenic ions of iron at a redshift z = 1.00 ± 0.02, providing an unambiguous measurement of the distance of a GRB. Line width and intensity imply that the progenitor of the GRB was a massive star system that ejected, before the GRB event, a quantity of iron ∼0.01 of the mass of the sun at a velocity ∼0.1 of the speed of light, probably by a supernova explosion.
