RE: starship-design: Go Starwisps

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Steve,

Your information is out of date. There has recently been an observation of a GRB 
that lasted long enough to get more than one telescope looking at it. Also afterwards, 
they confirmed the presence of a small faint object in the infrared band. They were 
pretty much able to confirm both its distance and the fact that it is (was) a stellar like 
object.

Lee Parker



Actually, GRBs are believed to be distant because there are some (highly
uncertain) redshift measurements of the assumed optical counterparts.
There are no parallax measurements because no GRBs have been observeed
to repeat, especially not conveniently a year apart.  The most accurate
parallax measurements I've heard of are around one milliarcsecond,
allowing distance estimation to approximately 1000 parsecs (3200 light
years), with substantial uncertainty.