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Does gamma-ray burst clustering finally settle the merger-versus-collapse debate?

Soumita Modak

May 28, 2026

Gamma-ray bursts come in two flavors—short and long—thought to arise from different cosmic catastrophes, but clustering algorithms keep disagreeing on how many groups exist because they require researchers to guess the answer in advance. A new parameter-free method cuts through this by letting the data itself determine the groups, confirming the two-class picture without hidden assumptions.
Published as A new completely parameter-free clustering algorithm for unsupervised classification of BATSE gamma-ray bursts arXiv:2605.30175
Read the original paper →