Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are some of the most extreme events in the Universe. As well as providing a natural laboratory for investigating fundamental physical processes, they might trace the cosmic star formation rate up to extreme redshifts and probe
the composition of the intergalactic medium over most of the Universes history. Radio observations of GRBs play a key part in determining their physical properties, but currently they are largely limited to follow-up observations of $gamma$-ray-detected objects. The SKA will significantly increase our ability to study GRB afterglows, following up several hundred objects in the high frequency bands already in the early science implementation of the telescope. SKA1-MID Bands 4 (4 GHz) and 5 (9.2 GHz) will be particularly suited to the detection of these transient phenomena. The SKA will trace the peak of the emission, sampling the thick-to-thin transition of the evolving spectrum, and follow-up the afterglow down to the time the ejecta slow down to non-relativistic speeds. The full SKA will be able to observe the afterglows across the non-relativistic transition, for ~25% of the whole GRB population. This will allow us to get a significant insight into the true energy budget of GRBs, probe their surrounding density profile, and the shock microphysics. The SKA will also be able to routinely detect the elusive orphan afterglow emission, from the population of GRBs whose jets are not pointed towards the Earth. We expect that a deep all-sky survey such as SKA1-SUR will see around 300 orphan afterglows every week. We predict these detection to be >1000 when the full SKA telescope will be operational.
We study a sample of Gamma-Ray Bursts detected by the Swift satellite with known redshift which show a precursor in the Swift-BAT light curve. We analyze the spectra of the precursors and compare them with the time integrated spectra of the prompt em
ission. We find neither a correlation between the two slopes nor a tendency for the precursors spectra to be systematically harder or softer than the prompt ones. The energetics of the precursors are large: on average, they are just a factor of a few less energetic (in the source rest frame energy range 15-150 keV) than the entire bursts. These properties do not depend upon the quiescent time between the end of the precursor and the start of the main event. These results suggest that what has been called a precursor is not a phenomenon distinct from the main event, but is tightly connected with it, even if, in some case, the quiescent time intervals can be longer than 100 seconds.
