No Arabic abstract
Coalescing binary systems, consisting of two collapsed objects, are among the most promising sources of high frequency gravitational waves signals detectable, in principle, by ground-based interferometers. Binary systems of Neutron Star or Black Hole/Neutron Star mergers should also give rise to short Gamma Ray Bursts, a subclass of Gamma Ray Bursts. Short-hard-Gamma Ray Bursts might thus provide a powerful way to infer the merger rate of two-collapsed object binaries. Under the hypothesis that most short Gamma Ray Bursts originate from binaries of Neutron Star or Black Hole/Neutron Star mergers, we outline here the possibility to associate short Gamma Ray Bursts as electromagnetic counterpart of coalescing binary systems.
We investigate the possible origin of extended emissions (EEs) of short gamma-ray bursts with an isotropic energy of ~ 10^(50-51) erg and a duration of a few 10 s to ~ 100 s, based on a compact binary (neutron star (NS)-NS or NS-black hole (BH)) merger scenario. We analyze the evolution of magnetized neutrino-dominated accretion disks of mass ~ 0.1 M_sun around BHs formed after the mergers, and estimate the power of relativistic outflows via the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) process. We show that a rotation energy of the BH up to > 10^52 erg can be extracted with an observed time scale of > 30 (1+z) s with a relatively small disk viscosity parameter of alpha < 0.01. Such a BZ power dissipates by clashing with non-relativistic pre-ejected matter of mass M ~ 10^-(2-4) M_sun, and forms a mildly relativistic fireball. We show that the dissipative photospheric emissions from such fireballs are likely in the soft X-ray band (1-10 keV) for M ~ 10^-2 M_sun possibly in NS-NS mergers, and in the BAT band (15-150 keV) for M ~ 10^-4 M_sun possibly in NS-BH mergers. In the former case, such soft EEs can provide a good chance of ~ 6 yr^-1 for simultaneous detections of the gravitational waves with a ~ 0.1 deg angular resolution by soft X-ray survey facilities like Wide-Field MAXI.
Gravitational waves detected from well-localized inspiraling binaries would allow to determine, directly and independently, both binary luminosity and redshift. In this case, such systems could behave as standard candles providing an excellent probe of cosmic distances up to $z <0.1$ and thus complementing other indicators of cosmological distance ladder.
In the faint short gamma-ray burst sGRB 170817A followed by the gravitational waves (GWs) from a merger of two neutron stars (NSs) GW170817, the spectral peak energy is too high to explain only by canonical off-axis emission. We investigate off-axis appearance of an sGRB prompt emission scattered by a cocoon, which is produced through the jet-merger-ejecta interaction, with either sub-relativistic or mildly-relativistic velocities. We show that the observed properties of sGRB 170817A, in particular the high peak energy, can be consistently explained by the Thomson-scattered emission with a typical sGRB jet, together by its canonical off-axis emission, supporting that an NS-NS merger is the origin of sGRBs. The scattering occurs at $lesssim 10^{10}$--$10^{12},{rm cm}$ not far from the central engine, implying the photospheric or internal shock origin of the sGRB prompt emission. The boundary between the jet and cocoon is sharp, which could be probed by future observations of off-axis afterglows. The scattering model predicts a distribution of the spectral peak energy that is similar to the observed one but with a cutoff around $sim$ MeV energy, and its correlations with the luminosity, duration, and time lag from GWs, providing a way to distinguish it from alternative models.
We investigate prolonged engine activities of short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs), such as extended and/or plateau emissions, as high-energy gamma-ray counterparts to gravitational waves (GWs). Binary neutron-star mergers lead to relativistic jets and merger ejecta with $r$-process nucleosynthesis, which are observed as SGRBs and kilonovae/macronovae, respectively. Long-term relativistic jets may be launched by the merger remnant as hinted in X-ray light curves of some SGRBs. The prolonged jets may dissipate their kinetic energy within the radius of the cocoon formed by the jet-ejecta interaction. Then the cocoon supplies seed photons to non-thermal electrons accelerated at the dissipation region, causing high-energy gamma-ray production through the inverse Compton scattering process. We numerically calculate high-energy gamma-ray spectra in such a system using a one-zone and steady-state approximation, and show that GeV--TeV gamma-rays are produced with a duration of $10^2-10^5$ seconds. They can be detected by {it Fermi}/LAT or CTA as gamma-ray counterparts to GWs.
We extract 18 candidate short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) with precursors from 660 SGRBs observed by {em Fermi} and {em Swift} satellites, and carry out a comprehensive analysis on their temporal and spectral features. We obtain the following results: (1) For a large fraction of candidates, the main burst durations are longer than their precursor durations, comparable to their quiescent times from the end of precursors to the beginning of their main bursts. (2) The average flux of precursors tends to increase as their main bursts brighten. (3) As seen from the distributions of hardness ratio and spectral fitting, the precursors are slightly spectrally softer with respect to the main bursts. Moreover, a significant portion of precursors and all main bursts favor a non-thermal spectrum. (4) The precursors might be a probe of the progenitor properties of SGRBs such as the magnetic field strength and the crustal equation of state if they arise from some processes before mergers of binary compact objects rather than post-merger processes.