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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 Swift's first report of an unusual light curve was withdrawn after a closer look showed that part of it came from noisy detectors.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: Later-epoch J-band upper limit from the SYSU 80 cm infrared telescope

GCN Circular 45942
GRB 261011A: Later-epoch J-band upper limit from the SYSU 80 cm infrared telescope
From: unknown
Issued: 2026-10-13 13:41 UTC
Type: GRB

Lu-Yao Wen, Jian-Hong Cao, Zhong-Nan Dong, Jin-Ji Li, Jia-Qi Lin, Pu Lin, Yun Shi, Hao-Nan Yang, Rui-Chen Gao, Jing-Kai Sun, Hao-Ran Zhang, P H Thomas Tam, Rong-Feng Shen, Bin Ma (Sun Yat-sen University) report on behalf of the SYSU 80cm infrared telescope team:

We carried out further J-band observations of GRB 261011A using the Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) 80 cm infrared telescope. We observed from 2026 October 12 17:37:44.942 to 19:41:05.309 UT, 27.85–29.91 hours after the Swift/BAT trigger. Our earlier J-band detections were reported in Huang et al. (GCN 45913).

We do not detect the source at the position of the counterpart (Cenko et al., GCN 45896; O'Neill et al., GCN 45897; Fu et al., GCN 45898; Izzo et al., GCN 45899; Wu et al., GCN 45900; Yin et al., GCN 45901; Shi et al., GCN 45903; Aryan et al., GCN 45904; Arya et al., GCN 45907; Izzo et al., GCN 45909; Huang et al., GCN 45913; Bochenek et al., GCN 45914; Li et al., GCN 45915; Zhao et al., GCN 45916; Takahashi et al., GCN 45917; Monsalves et al., GCN 45920; Cheng et al., GCN 45922), down to a 5-sigma limiting magnitude of J > 19.6 mag (Vega).

The limiting magnitude was calibrated against nearby stars from the 2MASS catalog and is reported in the Vega system, without correction for Galactic extinction. The SYSU 80 cm infrared telescope is operated and managed by the Department of Astronomy, Sun Yat-sen University.

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

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