re gamma ray bursters where are they in article apr midway uchicago edu pef quads uchicago edu it s enrico palazzo writes from graydon saundrsg qucdn queensu ca if all of these things have been detected in space has anyone looked into possible problems with the detectors that is is there some mechanism cosmic rays whatever that could cause the dector to think it was seeing one of these things graydon that would not explain why widely separated detectors such as on ulysses and pvo and ginga et al would see a burst at the same time in fact be fore batse having this widely separated interplanetary network was the only sure way to locate a random burst with only one detector one cannot locate a burst except to say it s somewhere in the field of view with two detectors one can use the time that the burst is seen in each detector to narrow the location to a thin annulus on the sky with three detectors one gets intersecting annuli giving two possible locations if one of these locations is impossible because say the earth blocked that part of the sky voila you have an error box batse by having detectors of its own can do its own location determination but only to within about degrees would someone at gsfc like david like to comment on the current state of location determination having inde pendent sightings by other detectors helps drive down the uncertainty you did touch on something that you didn t mean to though some believe in a reference that i have somewhere that absorption like features seen in a fraction of grbs can actually be caused by the detector it would be a mean nasty god though that would have a nai crystal act like a gauss neutron star but this is getting too far afield peter peterf oddjob uchicago edu all of this is very valid and very true but to add to this explaniation each individual detector also has a built in fail safe just so the detector does not read the background radiation i e cosmic rays if i remember right the detectors go off about to sigma above the background this is so they don t catch particularly energetic cosmic rays that would normally set it off even with this buffer they still have to throw out something like of the bursts that they do get because of the earth s van allen belts the south atlantic anomaly the sun if i remember right there is either a radar station or a radio station in australia and there are a couple other sources as well jeremy belgarath vax mankato msus edu
