Host Galaxy
During the night between 12 and 13 March, Jorge Melnick made observations of the region with the New Technology Telescope. He discovered a faint nebular patch at the burst's position, almost certainly a distant galaxy. Although there was a remote chance that the burst and this galaxy were unrelated, their positional coincidence provided strong evidence that GRBs occur in distant galaxies rather than within the Milky Way. This conclusion was later supported by observations of GRB 970508, the first burst to have its redshift determined.
The position of the burst's afterglow was measurably offset from the centroid of the host galaxy, effectively ruling out the possibility that the burst originated in an active galactic nucleus. The redshift of the galaxy was later determined to be z = 0.695, which corresponds to a distance of approximately 8.123×109 ly. At this distance, the burst would have released a total of 5.2×1044 J assuming isotropic emission.
Read more about this topic: GRB 970228
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