Starting as highly relativistic collimated jets, gamma-ray burst outflows gradually decelerate and become non-relativistic spherical blast waves. Although detailed analytical solutions describing the afterglow emission received by an on-axis observer during both the early and late phases of the outflow evolution exist, a calculation of the received flux during the intermediate phase and for an off-axis observer requires either a more simplified analytical model or direct numerical simulations of the outflow dynamics. In this paper we present light curves for off-axis observers covering the long-term evolution of the blast wave calculated from a high resolution two-dimensional relativistic hydrodynamics simulation using a synchrotron radiation model. We compare our results to earlier analytical work and calculate the consequence of the observer angle with respect to the jet axis both for the detection of orphan afterglows and for jet break fits to the observational data. We find that observable jet breaks can be delayed for up to several weeks for off-axis observers, potentially leading to overestimation of the beaming corrected total energy. When using our off-axis light curves to create synthetic Swift X-ray data, we find that jet breaks are likely to remain hidden in the data. We also confirm earlier results in the literature finding that only a very small number of local Type Ibc supernovae can harbor an orphan afterglow.
Download