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Register a new userA study of gamma-ray burst afterglows as they first come into view of the Swift Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope
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We examine the the emission from optically bright gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows as the Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) on the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory first begins observing, following the slew to target the GRB, while the pointing of the Swift satellite is still settling. We verify the photometric quality of the UVOT settling data using bright stars in the field of view. In the majority of cases we find no problems with the settling exposure photometry, but in one case we excise the first second of the exposure to mitigate a spacecraft attitude reconstruction issue, and in a second case we exclude the first second of the exposure in which the UVOT photocathode voltage appears to be ramping up. Of a sample of 23 afterglows which have peak V magnitudes <16, we find that all are detected in the settling exposures, when Swift arrives on target. For 9 of the GRBs the UVOT settling exposure took place before the conclusion of the prompt gamma-ray emission. Five of these GRBs have well defined optical peaks after the settling exposures, with rises of >0.5 mag in their optical lightcurves, and there is a marginal trend for these GRBs to have long T90. Such a trend is expected for thick-shell afterglows, but the temporal indices of the optical rises and the timing of the optical peaks appear to rule out thick shells.
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We present the first statistical analysis of 27 UVOT optical/ultra-violet lightcurves of GRB afterglows. We have found, through analysis of the lightcurves in the observers frame, that a significant fraction rise in the first 500s after the GRB trigger, that all lightcurves decay after 500s, typically as a power-law with a relatively narrow distribution of decay indices, and that the brightest optical afterglows tend to decay the quickest. We find that the rise could either be produced physically by the start of the forward shock, when the jet begins to plough into the external medium, or geometrically where an off-axis observer sees a rising lightcurve as an increasing amount of emission enters the observers line of sight, which occurs as the jet slows. We find that at 99.8% confidence, there is a correlation, in the observed frame, between the apparent magnitude of the lightcurves at 400s and the rate of decay after 500s. However, in the rest frame a Spearman Rank test shows only a weak correlation of low statistical significance between luminosity and decay rate. A correlation should be expected if the afterglows were produced by off-axis jets, suggesting that the jet is viewed from within the half-opening angle theta or within a core of uniform energy density theta_c. We also produced logarithmic luminosity distributions for three rest frame epochs. We find no evidence for bimodality in any of the distributions. Finally, we compare our sample of UVOT lightcurves with the XRT lightcurve canonical model. The range in decay indices seen in UVOT lightcurves at any epoch is most similar to the range in decay of the shallow decay segment of the XRT canonical model. However, in the XRT canonical model there is no indication of the rising behaviour observed in the UVOT lightcurves.
To date, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) onboard Swift has detected ~ 1000 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), of which ~ 360 GRBs have redshift measurements, ranging from z = 0.03 to z = 9.38. We present the analyses of the BAT-detected GRBs for the past ~ 11 years up through GRB151027B. We report summaries of both the temporal and spectral analyses of the GRB characteristics using event data (i.e., data for each photon within approximately 250 s before and 950 s after the BAT trigger time), and discuss the instrumental sensitivity and selection effects of GRB detections. We also explore the GRB properties with redshift when possible. The result summaries and data products are available at http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/results/batgrbcat/index.html . In addition, we perform searches for GRB emissions before or after the event data using the BAT survey data. We estimate the false detection rate to be only one false detection in this sample. There are 15 ultra-long GRBs (~ 2% of the BAT GRBs) in this search with confirmed emission beyond ~ 1000 s of event data, and only two GRBs (GRB100316D and GRB101024A) with detections in the survey data prior to the starting of event data. (Some figures shown here are in lower resolution due to the size limit on arXiv. The full resolution version can be found at http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/results/batgrbcat/3rdBATcatalog.pdf )
The electron energy distribution index, p, is a fundamental parameter of the synchrotron emission from a range of astronomical sources. Here we examine one such source of synchrotron emission, Gamma-Ray Burst afterglows observed by the Swift satellite. Within the framework of the blast wave model, we examine the constraints placed on the distribution of p by the observed X-ray spectral indices and parametrise the distribution. We find that the observed distribution of spectral indices are inconsistent with an underlying distribution of p composed of a single discrete value but consistent with a Gaussian distribution centred at p = 2.36 and having a width of 0.59. Furthermore, accepting that the underlying distribution is a Gaussian, we find the majority (>94%) of GRB afterglows in our sample have cooling break frequencies less than the X-ray frequency.
We selected a sample of 33 Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) detected by Swift, with known redshift and optical extinction at the host frame. For these, we constructed the de-absorbed and K-corrected X-ray and optical rest frame light curves. These are modelled as the sum of two components: emission from the forward shock due to the interaction of a fireball with the circum-burst medium and an additional component, treated in a completely phenomenological way. The latter can be identified, among other possibilities, as late prompt emission produced by a long lived central engine with mechanisms similar to those responsible for the production of the standard early prompt radiation. Apart from flares or re-brightenings, that we do not model, we find a good agreement with the data, despite of their complexity and diversity. Although based in part on a phenomenological model with a relatively large number of free parameters, we believe that our findings are a first step towards the construction of a more physical scenario. Our approach allows us to interpret the behaviour of the optical and X-ray afterglows in a coherent way, by a relatively simple scenario. Within this context it is possible to explain why sometimes no jet break is observed; why, even if a jet break is observed, it is often chromatic; why the steepening after the jet break time is often shallower than predicted. Finally, the decay slope of the late prompt emission after the shallow phase is found to be remarkably similar to the time profile expected by the accretion rate of fall-back material (i.e. proportional to t^{-5/3}), suggesting that this can be the reason why the central engine can be active for a long time.
We continue our systematic statistical study on optical afterglow data of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We present the apparent magnitude distributions of early optical afterglows at different epochs (t= 10^2 s, t = 10^3 s, and 1 hour) for the optical lightcurves of a sample of 93 GRBs (the global sample), and for sub-samples with an afterglow onset bump or a shallow decay segment. For the onset sample and shallow decay sample we also present the brightness distribution at the peak time t_{p} and break time t_{b}, respectively. All the distributions can be fit with Gaussian functions. We further perform Monte Carlo simulations to infer the luminosity function of GRB optical emission at the rest-frame time 10^3 seconds, t_{p}, and t_{b}, respectively. Our results show that a single power-law luminosity function is adequate to model the data, with indices -1.40+/-0.10, -1.06+/- 0.16, and -1.54+/- 0.22, respectively. Based on the derived rest-frame 10^3 s luminosity function, we generate the intrinsic distribution of the R-band apparent magnitude M_{R} at the observed time 10^{3} seconds post trigger, which peaks at M_{R}=22.5 mag. The fraction of GRBs whose R-band magnitude is fainter than 22 mag, and 25 mag and at the observer time 10^3 seconds are ~63% and ~25%, respectively. The detection probabilities of the optical afterglows with ground-based robotic telescopes and UVOT onboard {Swift} are roughly consistent with that inferred from this intrinsic M_{R} distribution, indicating that the variations of the dark GRB fraction among the samples with different telescopes may be due to the observational selection effect, although the existence of an intrinsically dark GRB population cannot be ruled out.
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