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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 caught on 7 October 2026 by the SVOM satellite, Fermi, and several other space telescopes. It came from a patch of sky toward the constellation Cetus, and the Einstein Probe X-ray telescope also saw it. Within minutes, ground telescopes found a fading optical (visible-light) glow at the spot, and later X-ray and infrared detections confirmed it. A spectrum from the Very Large Telescope in Chile put the burst at redshift 2.101, which means the light left about 10 billion years ago. The burst lasted roughly 23 seconds, which fits the long kind of gamma-ray burst, usually produced when a massive star collapses. The glow faded from about magnitude 15 in the first minutes to about 21.6 a day later. That is a normal fading pattern for an afterglow.

How unusual is it? Most gamma-ray bursts have no measured distance, but this one has a secure spectroscopic redshift of 2.101 and a bright, well-followed afterglow seen in optical, infrared and X-ray light. That makes it notable, but it is otherwise an ordinary long burst, not one of the record-setters.

Written by an AI model (claude-sonnet-5-5) from the official reports in this thread, and rewritten as new reports arrived (version 4); last updated . It may contain mistakes: the reports themselves are the authority.

GRB 261007A: SVOM/COLIBRÍ (FM-GFT) optical observations
GCN Circulars —

GCN Circular 45848
GRB 261007A: SVOM/COLIBRÍ (FM-GFT) optical observations
From: Camila Angulo Valdez at UNAM
Issued: 2026-10-08 06:13 UTC
Type: GRB, X-ray Transient, Optical Transient

Camila Angulo (UNAM), Marion Guelfand (CPPM), Stéphane Basa (UAR Pytheas), William H. Lee (UNAM), Edilberto Aguilar-Ruiz (UNAM), Jean-Luc Atteia (IRAP), , Dalya Akl (NYUAD), Sarah Antier (IJCLAB), Rosa L. Becerra (UNAM), Nathaniel R. Butler (ASU), Damien Dornic (CPPM), Jean-Grégoire Ducoin (CPPM), Francis Fortin (IRAP), Leonardo García-García (UNAM), Ramandeep Gill (UNAM), Noémie Globus (UNAM), Asuka Kuwata (UNAM), Massimiliano Lincetto (CPPM), Nikos Mandarakas (LAM), Diego López-Cámara (UNAM), Francesco Magnani (CPPM), Enrique Moreno Méndez (UNAM), Margarita Pereyra (UNAM), Fredd Sánchez Álvarez (UNAM), Benjamin Schneider (LAM), Antonio de Ugarte Postigo (LAM), Alan M. Watson (UNAM), report:

We imaged the field of the SVOM GRB 261007A (Goto et al., GCN Circ. 45824) using the DDRAGO wide-field imager on the SVOM/COLIBRÍ (FM-GFT) telescope. We observed from 2026-10-08 04:57:06 to 05:41:53 UTC (from 22.5 to 23.45 hours after the trigger) and obtained 66 minutes of exposure in the r and z filters.

The data were reduced and coadded with the ASU pipeline. The photometry was calibrated using nearby stars from the PanSTARRS DR1 catalog, is in the AB system, and is not corrected for Galactic extinction.

We detected the optical counterpart (Zheng et al., GCN Circ. 45825; Saccardi et al., GCN Circ. 45829; Mohan et al., GCN Circ. 45832; Saccardi et al., GCN Circ. 45837; Shi et al., GCN Circ. 45838; An et al., GCN Circ. 45840; Arya et al., GCN Circ. 45841; Rehemtulla et al., GCN Circ. 45843; and Ruiz-Laguna et al., GCN Circ. 45844), at a preliminary magnitude of:

r = 21.65 +/- 0.03,
z = 21.32 +/- 0.08.

Further observations are ongoing.

We thank the staff of the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, as well as the technical and engineering teams at CEA, CPPM, IRAP, LAM, OHP, OSU Pytheas, and UNAM.

COLIBRÍ is an astronomical observatory developed and operated jointly by France (AMU, CNES and CNRS) and Mexico (UNAM and SECIHTI). It is located at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional on the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, Baja California, Mexico.

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

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