Chandra Release - April 4, 2001

Visual Description: GRB 010222

This is an image of a gamma-ray burst, GRB 010222 in the sky, with a green line pointing towards the source in the center and labeling its name. The Chandra X-ray Observatory image shows the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst as a mottled, colorful pixelated dot in the center of a large empty black field. The data provides evidence that these massive explosions take place where stars are born, suggesting that the blast waves from gamma-ray bursts can hit a wall of very dense gas. This barrier may be the crowded region where stars form. The hypernova theory of gamma-ray bursts suggests that the massive star required for a gamma-ray burst explosion evolves extremely rapidly – only over the course of about one million years -- within dense star-forming regions. Thus, the hypernova explosion may occur in the same stellar environment that originally produced the massive star itself, and perhaps may trigger even more star formation.