any of a class of very distant objects responsible for intense, nonrepeating flashes of high-energy gamma rays that appear unpredictably at arbitrary points in the sky at a rate of about one per day and typically last only seconds. First discovered in the 1960s, these powerfully luminous events long remained completely mysterious, since there seemed no evidence of their sources at visible or radio wavelengths. Such evidence was first found in 1997, and the sources, dubbed bursters, are now known to be among the most distant objects in the universe. The objects are thought to be collapsing hypergiant stars or, perhaps in some cases, merging neutron stars. There also exists a small group of much weaker, repeating bursters, which are identified with more local objects.
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