2013/11/18 by Andrew J. Levan, A. J. Levan, B. P. Gompertz +115 · 28 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Mycorrhizal Fungi and Plant Interactions #Lichen and fungal ecology #Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06759-1
The mergers of binary compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes are of central interest to several areas of astrophysics, including as the progenitors of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)<sup>1</sup>, sources of high-frequency gravitational waves (GWs)<sup>2</sup> and likely production sites for heavy-element nucleosynthesis by means of rapid neutron capture (the r-process)<sup>3</sup>. Here we present observations of the exceptionally bright GRB 230307A. We show that GRB 230307A belongs to the class of long-duration GRBs associated with compact object mergers<sup>4-6</sup> and contains a kilonova similar to AT2017gfo, associated with the GW merger GW170817 (refs. <sup>7-12</sup>). We obtained James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) mid-infrared imaging and spectroscopy 29 and 61 days after the burst. The spectroscopy shows an emission line at 2.15 microns, which we interpret as tellurium (atomic mass A = 130) and a very red source, emitting most of its light in the mid-infrared owing to the production of lanthanides. These observations demonstrate that nucleosynthesis in GRBs can create r-process elements across a broad atomic mass range and play a central role in heavy-element nucleosynthesis across the Universe.