A short gamma-ray burst has looked since 2006 like it went off in empty space, and archival Webb images have now turned up a faint galaxy two arcseconds away that, if it is the burst’s real home, would account for an energy never robustly observed in a well-studied short burst, a projected 42-kiloparsec offset, and a merger rate this one event alone inflates past what gravitational-wave detectors infer

GRB 061201 was the textbook "hostless" burst. A team led from the Purple Mountain Observatory weighs two candidate galaxies against each other and finds the faint one wins on most tests, loses the formal chance-alignment score, and carries one loud caveat: its redshift is fitted rather than measured.