A Decline in the X-Ray through Radio Emission from GW170817 Continues to Support an Off-axis Structured Jet
By K. Alexander, Raffaella Margutti, P. Blanchard, W. Fong, E. Berger, A. Hajela, T. Eftekhari, Ryan Chornock, P. Cowperthwaite, D. Giannios and 10 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2018
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We present new observations of the binary neutron star merger GW170817 at Δt ≈ 220–290 days post-merger, at radio (Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array; VLA), X-ray (Chandra X-ray Observatory), and optical (Hubble Space Telescope; HST) wavelengths. These observations provide the first evidence for a turnover in the X-ray light curve, mirroring a decline in the radio emission at ≳5σ significance. The radio-to-X-ray spectral energy distribution exhibits no evolution into the declining phase. Our full multi-wavelength data set is consistent with the predicted behavior of our previously published models of a successful structured jet expanding into a low-density circumbinary medium, but pure cocoon models with a choked jet cannot be ruled out. If future observations continue to track our predictions, we expect that the radio and X-ray emission will remain detectable until ∼1000 days post-merger.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/045ed19286b29e907b7aab3076740bdb58ec448d
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Citations in the corpus
- Long-term GRMHD simulations of neutron star merger accretion discs: implications for electromagnetic counterparts (2018, background): “As of this writing, the non-thermal emission from GW170817 still displays a single synchrotron power-law spectral energy distribution extending from the X-rays to the radio band, and a luminosity that has reached a peak and is now decreasing (Alexander et al. 2018; Nynka et al. 2018).”
- Binary Neutron Star Mergers: Mass Ejection, Electromagnetic Counterparts, and Nucleosynthesis (2018, background): “A synchrotron remnant has been detected in X-ray, optical, and radio bands for GW170817 (Haggard et al. 2017; Hallinan et al. 2017; Margutti et al. 2017, 2018; Mooley et al. 2018a; Troja et al. 2017; Alexander et al. 2018; Dobie et al. 2018; Lyman et al. 2018; Ruan et al. 2018).”