Unprecedented Stellar Destruction and Explosions Baffle Astronomers.

An international team of astrophysicists has discovered a new way to destroy a star and generate a gamma-ray burst (GRB) by observing the collision of stars or stellar remnants in the dense environment surrounding a supermassive black hole at the core of an ancient galaxy. The researchers used the Gemini South telescope to make long-term observations of the GRB's fading afterglow and pinpointed its location to a region less than 100 light-years from the nucleus of the galaxy. The discovery of this event in the core of its old, quiescent galaxy opens the door to promising new avenues for the formation of binary systems that have rarely been observed before.