1. P. Price (U. of Hawaii) and many others Discovery and identification of the very high redshift afterglow of GRB 050904 J. B. Haislip, et al. astro-ph 0509660, submitted to Nature.

2. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and their afterglows were predicted in 2000 to occur in sufficient numbers and at sufficient brightnesses at very high redshifts (z > 5) to eventually replace quasars as probes of the early universe. In particular GRBs can provide insight for studies of element formation and reionization and the star- formation history of the early universe, perhaps back to when the first stars formed. The IRTF has a target of opportunity proposal to observe GRBs in the infrared. The proposed work on the IRTF is to obtain L-band photometry on sources that are bright enough, since the IRTF is one of the few telescopes with L-band capability. Reported here, however, is K-band photometry of the first high-z GRB that was part of world-wide observations.

3. What Makes a GRB? The progenitors of at least some (most?) long/soft GRBs are massive stars that explode as a SN, with a variety of peak brightness.

4. The Swift Spacecraft Swift has three instruments: the X-ray Telescope, the Ultraviolet/ Optical Telescope, and the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). The first two instruments have co-aligned field-of-view so that any source detected by BAT can be observed in all three wavebands simultaneously within 200 seconds. Positional information is provided to the ground as soon as a burst is detected. For more info: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/spacecraft/

5. Images of GRB 050904 Figure 1. Left panel: Near-infrared discovery image of the bright (J =17.36 mag) afterglow of GRB 050904 from the SOAR telescope. Middle panel: Near-simultaneous non-detection of the afterglow at visible wavelengths (Rc > 20.1 mag) from one of the six PROMPT telescopes atop Cerro Tololo. Right panel: Color composite (riz) image of the afterglow 3.2 days after the burst from 8.1-m Gemini South.

6. Photometric Redshift Figure 2. Spectral flux distribution of the afterglow of GRB 050904 scaled to 10.6 hours after the burst and a best- fit model. The sharp drop at wavelengths 10^14.52 Hz) is used to obtain a photometric redshift of 6.28. Data from PROMPT, Calar Alto, SOAR, 60 inch Palomar, UKIRT, IRTF, UKIRT, and Gemini South.

7. Conclusions ● Photometric redshift for GRB 050904 is z = 6.4 +/- 0.1 (spectroscopic measurement from Subaru was 6.29) ● We expect more high-redshift GRBs to come from Swift ● NIR observations of the afterglow are essential for identifyinghigh-redshift GRBs; IRTF can play a strong role.