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Transient Alerts » in reply to GRB 261007A — GRB, X-ray Transient

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In plain words Notable

A burst of gamma rays, the most energetic form of light, was detected on 7 October 2026 by the SVOM satellite and by Fermi, with NuSTAR also catching it in its shield data. Einstein Probe saw it in X-rays too. It came from a spot in the southern sky, in the direction of the constellation Cetus. Telescopes quickly found a fading optical afterglow there, and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope measured its distance. The light left about 2.1 in redshift, a measure of how much the universe has stretched the light since it set out, which puts the burst very roughly 11 billion light-years away. The gamma rays lasted about 23 seconds and were fairly bright. This is most likely the death of a massive star collapsing into a black hole.

How unusual is it? A measured redshift (z = 2.101) and a bright, quickly found optical afterglow make this better studied than most gamma-ray bursts, which often have no distance. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary long burst from a collapsing massive star, so it is not exceptional.

Written by an AI model (claude-sonnet-5-5) from the official reports in this thread, and rewritten as new reports arrived (version 3); last updated . It may contain mistakes: the reports themselves are the authority.

GRB 261007A: SVOM/C-GFT optical observations
GCN Circulars —

GCN Circular 45838
GRB 261007A: SVOM/C-GFT optical observations
From: SVOM_group
Issued: 2026-10-07 15:47 UTC
Type: GRB, Optical Transient

Y.Y. Shi(GXU), Z. Kang (CHO),S.J. Yin (GXU), C. Wu (NAOC), L.P. Xin, X.H. Han, P.P. Zhang, X.M. Lu (NAOC), Z.W. Li, Y. Lv (CHO), R.S. Zhang, Y.J. Xiao, Y.L. Qiu, J. Wang, J.S. Deng, L. Huang, J.Y. Wei (NAOC), W.L. Zhang(PMO), X. Tian(GXU) report on behalf of the SVOM/C-GFT team:


We observed the field of GRB 261007A detected by SVOM/ECLAIRs (Goto et al., GCN 45824) with LATIOS on SVOM/C-GFT. Observations started at 2026-10-07T12:54:31 UTC, ~7.21 hr after the trigger.

The optical candidate (Zheng et al., GCN 45825; Saccardi et al., GCN 45829; Mohan et al., GCN 45832; Saccardi et al., GCN 45837) was faintly detected in our stacked images of band g, r and i. The magnitude is:
|[date-obs(mid-time)] | Mid_t-T0(h) | exposure time (s) | band | mag (AB) | mag_err|
|--------------------|--------------|-------------------|------|----------|--------|
|2026-10-07T13:46:09 | 8.07 | 19×100s | g | 20.35 | +/- 0.20 |
|2026-10-07T14:02:59 | 8.35 | 20×100s | r | 20.26 | +/- 0.23 |
|2026-10-07T13:28:38 | 7.78 | 19×100s | i | 19.93 | +/- 0.15 |


The photometry was calibrated against DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys DR10 catalogue and no correction for Galactic dust extinction was applied.

We thank the observation assistants B.-W. Li and H.-X. Xue at Jilin observatory for their excellent support.

The Chinese Ground Follow-up Telescope (C-GFT) for the SVOM mission is located at Jilin Station, Changchun Observatory, National Astronomical Observatories, CAS. It features two instruments: (1) CATCH at the Cassegrain focus with a 21 arcmin x 21 arcmin FOV for simultaneous g/r/i-band imaging, and (2) LATIOS, a 4k x 4k CMOS camera at the prime focus with a 1.28 deg x 1.28 deg FOV that images in g, r, and i bands via filter switching.

Every one of the gamma-ray bursts GCN reports is posted here.
Relayed automatically from NASA's General Coordinates Network.

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