There's a possibility that I found something!

A gamma-ray burst, GRB 070306, was detected today by Swift. It lasted around 200 seconds, putting it in the “long burst” category.

I ran the early x-ray data through a fast Fourier transform (FFT), like I've been doing since the summer, and found a spike in the power density spectrum of the windowed timing high-resolution data at a frequency of around 1 Hz (1 second period). Although the spike was only slightly above the 99% confidence level, it's the highest I've seen in my 46 GRB timing study sample.

Sandy and I ran the data through efsearch, efold, and a z2m program, and it appears there might be a second peak at 2 seconds (0.5 Hz), and maybe a third at 0.5 seconds (2 Hz). Or it could be harmonics. Or it could be nothing. I created every plot I could think to create and sent it off to Others More Knowledgeable. That was at 8:00 this evening, and one of of them is on vacation, so I don't expect to hear back until tomorrow at the earliest.

I'm so excited! If this is real, this is the first discovery of a pulsation in a GRB (that I know of). It's at a period we didn't expect, but in science, data modifies the theory, not the other way around. We expected to see a newborn pulsar (a spinning neutron star, a type of very small and dense star at or near the end of its life) spinning on the order of milliseconds (that's roughly a thousand times a second), but there's always the possibility that this could be a slower pulsar, or not a pulsar at all.

I should know more tomorrow.