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Transient Alerts » in reply to GRB 261011A — GRB, X-ray Transient

In plain words Notable

On 11 October 2026 two satellites, SVOM and Swift, caught a long gamma-ray burst (a brief flash of high-energy light from a distant exploding star) in the southern sky. It lasted roughly a minute or more, depending on the instrument. Within minutes, telescopes around the world saw a fading visible-light and X-ray afterglow at the same spot. Two large telescopes measured the distance from the light's fingerprints: the burst happened at redshift 2.407, meaning the light left roughly 11 billion years ago. The afterglow faded below detection within about a day, and no host galaxy has been clearly detected. It is most likely an ordinary long burst from the collapse of a massive star. Swift's first report of an unusual light curve was withdrawn after a closer look showed that part of it came from noisy detectors.

How unusual is it? Most gamma-ray bursts have no measured distance, but this one has a confirmed redshift (2.407) from two independent telescopes plus a bright afterglow seen in many wavelengths; otherwise its properties look typical, and the initially reported oddity turned out to be instrumental noise.

Written by an AI model (claude-sonnet-5-5) from the official reports in this thread, and rewritten as new reports arrived (version 9); last updated . It may contain mistakes: the reports themselves are the authority.

GRB 261011A: TRT optical afterglow detection

GCN Circular 45898
GRB 261011A: TRT optical afterglow detection
From: unknown
Issued: 2026-10-11 14:55 UTC
Type: GRB, Afterglow, Optical Transient

S.Y. Fu (HUST), K. Noysena, K. Chanchaiworawit, S. Tinyanont (NARIT), J. An, L.B. He, S.Q. Jiang, X. Liu, D. Xu, Z.P. Zhu (NAOC), L. Lei (HUST) report:

We observed the field of GRB 261011A detected by SVOM (Huang et al., GCN 45895) and Swift (Cenko et al., GCN 45896) using the 0.7-m telescope of the Thai Robotic Telescope network (TRT). A series of Sloan r-band frames were obtained.

The optical afterglow is detected at the Swift/UVOT position (Cenko et al., GCN 45896) with r ~ 19.1 at a median time of 37.6 mins after the Swift trigger.

Observations are ongoing.

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

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