Expected Number and Flux Distribution of Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows with High Redshifts

By Benedetta Ciardi, Abraham Loeb. 2000

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If gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) occur at high redshifts, then their bright afterglow emission can be used to probe the ionization and metal enrichment histories of the intervening intergalactic medium during the epoch of reionization. In contrast to other sources, such as galaxies or quasars, which fade rapidly with increasing redshift, the observed infrared flux from a GRB afterglow at a fixed observed age is only a weak function of its redshift. This results from a combination of the spectral slope of GRB afterglows and the time stretching of their evolution in the observer's frame. Assuming that the GRB rate is proportional to the star formation rate and that the characteristic energy output of GRBs is ~1052 ergs, we predict that there are always ~15 GRBs from redshifts z ≳ 5 across the sky that are brighter than ~100 nJy at an observed wavelength of ~2 μm. The infrared spectrum of these sources could be taken with the future Next Generation Space Telescope as a follow-up to early X-ray localization with the Swift satellite.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16bb6bd73451282e4df48fd932a462078ee2de61

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Citations in the corpus

In the Beginning: The First Sources of Light and the Reionization of the Universe (2000, background): “If so then the broad-band afterglows of these bursts could provide a powerful tool for probing the epoch of reionization (Lamb & Reichart 2000; Ciardi & Loeb 2000).”
Line-driven Winds, Ionizing Fluxes, and Ultraviolet Spectra of Hot Stars at Extremely Low Metallicity. I. Very Massive O Stars (2002, background): “…of gamma-ray bursts (MacFayden, Woosley, & Heger 2001; Djorgovski et al. 2001b; Kulkarni et al. 2000; Reichardt 2001), which then—as tracers of the cosmic star formation history— might originate to a large fraction at very high redshift (Bromm & Loeb 2002; Ciardi & Loeb 2000; Lamb & Reichart 2000).”
Revealing the High-Redshift Star Formation Rate with Gamma-Ray Bursts (2008, background): “…by considering the increasing incompletenessof the GRB sample withz due to ourLiso cut, since for fixed luminosity, higher-z bursts are relatively more difficult to detect (Butler et al. 2007) and the universe will at somez quickly become opaque blueward of Lyα (e.g., Ciardi & Loeb 2000).”
Probing the cosmic reionization history and local environment of gamma‐ray bursts through radio dispersion (2003, methodology): “A further break due to subrelativistic expansion (Huang, Dai & Lu 1998, Ciardi & Loeb 2000) can occur relatively early for a dense circumburst medium, but is irrelevant for the present purpose and not considered here. c© 2003 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–11”
The First Cosmic Structures and Their Effects (2004, background): “In contrast to other sources, such as galaxies or quasars, the observed infrared flux from a GRB afterglow at a fixed observed age is only a weak function of its redshift (e.g. Ciardi & Loeb 2000).”
Generic Spectrum and Ionization Efficiency of a Heavy Initial Mass Function for the First Stars (2000, background): “If γ-ray bursts (GRBs) originate from the collapse of these massive stars, then a heavy IMF will produce a larger abundance of GRBs at high redshifts than previously estimated (Ciardi & Loeb 2000).”
Predictions for high-frequency radio surveys of extragalactic sources (2004, background): “13 and 14 we show (dotdashed line) the estimates of the counts of GRB afterglows (kindly provided by B. Ciardi) yielded by the Ciardi & Loeb (2000) model.”
The First Stars (2003, background): “…Bursts as Probes of the First Stars GRBs are the brightest electromagnetic explosions in the universe, and they should be detectable out to very high redshifts (e.g., Wijers et al. 1998, Blain & Natarajan 2000, Ciardi & Loeb 2000, Lamb & Reichart 2000, Bromm & Loeb 2002, Choudhury & Srianand 2002).”
A RADIO-SELECTED SAMPLE OF GAMMA-RAY BURST AFTERGLOWS (2011, background): “As first noted by Ciardi & Loeb (2000) and shown by Frail et al. (2006), the detection rate of radio afterglows is largely insensitive to redshift.”
GRB 080913 AT REDSHIFT 6.7 (2008, background): “…as early as 20<∼ z <∼60 (Kogut et al. 2003, Bromm & Loeb 2006, Naoz & Bromberg 2007), GRBs are believed to exist as early as z ∼ 15− 20, and their gammaray and IR emissions are bright enough to be detected by the current instruments (Lamb & Reichart 2000; Ciardi & Loeb 2000; Gou et al. 2004).”
The Cosmic Dispersion Measure from Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows: Probing the Reionization History and the Burst Environment (2003, background): “At highDM ∼ DMhost Gal z, the maximum and minimum DM may evolve ashost ∼DM and ∼ #max 12 3 min 12 1/3(M/10 M )(1 z) DM (M/10 M )Gal , Gal , , respectively, for a host galaxy with the halo massM2(1 z) based on the hierarchical galaxy formation (Ciardi & Loeb 2000).”
Model-independent Multivariable Gamma-Ray Burst Luminosity Indicator and Its Possible Cosmological Implications (2005, background): “They should be detectable out to a very high redshift (Lamb & Reichart 2000; Ciardi & Loeb 2000; Gou et al. 2004).”
Radio and millimeter continuum surveys and their astrophysical implications (2009, background): “Estimates of the counts of GRB afterglows have been made by Ciardi & Loeb (2000), who found that at a fixed time-lag after the GRB in the observer’s frame, there is only a mild change in the observed flux density at radio wavelengths with increasing redshift.”
Observational Constraints on Cosmic Reionization (2006, background): “At high-redshift, the time dilation means that their afterglow will fade away (1 + z) times slower, aiding rapid spectroscopic follow-up observations (e.g. Ciardi & Loeb 2000) to probe the IGM evolution.”
Theories of Gamma-Ray Bursts (2001, background): “At a given observed wavelength and a given observed time delay, the observed brightness of a burst afterglow decreases more slowly at higher redshifts, since the the afterglow is observed at an earlier source time and at a higher frequency where it is brighter (Ciardi & Loeb 2000).”
The Reionization of the Universe by the First Stars and Quasars (2000, background): “Ciardi & Loeb (2000) showed that unlike other sources (such as galaxies and quasars), which fade rapidly with increasing redshift, the observed infrared flux from a GRB afterglow at a fixed observed age is only a weak function of its redshift (Figure 18).”