Cosmic Gamma-Ray Bursts: The Remaining Mysteries

Abstract

To anyone who has read a scientific journal or even a newspaper in the last six months, it might appear that cosmic gamma-ray bursts hold no more mysteries: they are cosmological, and possibly the most powerful explosions in the Universe. In fact, however, bursts remain mysterious in many ways. There is no general agreement upon the nature of the event which releases the initial energy. One burst at least appears to strain the energy budget of the merging neutron star model. There is evidence that another recent event may have come from a nearby supernova. Finally, while the number count statistics clearly show a strong deviation from the -3/2 power law expected for a Euclidean, homogeneous distribution, the distributions of some classes of bursts appear to follow a -3/2 power law rather closely. The recent data on bursts is reviewed, some of the mysteries discussed, and future experiments are outlined.