NASA is hosting a news conference at 1 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, Oct. 5, to announce scientists have solved a 35-year-old mystery. The press conference is in NASA’s auditorium, 300 E Street S.W., Washington.

Scientists solved the mystery of the origin of powerful, split-second flashes of light called short gamma ray bursts. The flashes, brighter than a billion suns and lasting only a few milliseconds, had previously been too fast to catch.

Panelists:

  • Kim Weaver, program scientist, NASA Headquarters
  • Neil Gehrels, Swift principal investigator, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
  • Derek Fox, asst. professor, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Penn State University, State College, Pa.
  • Albert Lazzarini, Data & Computing group leader, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
  • Edward Kolb, director, Particle Astrophysics Center, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Ill.
  • George Ricker, HETE principal investigator, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, Mass.

NASA TV is carrying the conference live with Q&A capability from participating NASA centers. To ask questions by phone, reporters may call: 888/282-1670 or 210/234-0016; provide the passcode “NSU.”

For continental North America, NASA TV is carried on an MPEG-2 digital signal accessed via satellite AMC-6, at 72 degrees west longitude, transponder 17C, 4040 MHz, vertical polarization. It’s available in Alaska and Hawaii on an MPEG-2 digital signal accessed via satellite AMC-7, transponder 18C, 137 degrees west longitude, 4060 MHz, vertical polarization. A Digital Video Broadcast compliant Integrated Receiver Decoder is required for reception. For information about NASA TV, including complete digital downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv