The physics of gamma-ray bursts & relativistic jets
By Pawan Kumar, Bing Zhang. 2014
841 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract We provide a comprehensive review of major developments in our understanding of gamma-ray bursts, with particular focus on the discoveries made within the last fifteen years when their true nature was uncovered. We describe the observational properties of photons from the radio to 100s GeV bands, both in the prompt emission and the afterglow phases. Mechanisms for the generation of these photons in GRBs are discussed and confronted with observations to shed light on the physical properties of these explosions, their progenitor stars and the surrounding medium. After presenting observational evidence that a powerful, collimated, jet moving at close to the speed of light is produced in these explosions, we describe our current understanding regarding the generation, acceleration, and dissipation of the jet. We discuss mounting observational evidence that long duration GRBs are produced when massive stars die, and that at least some short duration bursts are associated with old, roughly solar mass, compact stars. The question of whether a black-hole or a strongly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron star is produced in these explosions is also discussed. We provide a brief summary of what we have learned about relativistic collisionless shocks and particle acceleration from GRB afterglow studies, and discuss the current understanding of radiation mechanism during the prompt emission phase. We discuss theoretical predictions of possible high-energy neutrino emission from GRBs and the current observational constraints. Finally, we discuss how these explosions may be used to study cosmology, e.g. star formation, metal enrichment, reionization history, as well as the formation of first stars and galaxies in the universe.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75481bf26a8a8ad926ad562a32b60772b4de6aa6
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Citations in the corpus
- Neutrino-dominated accretion flows as the central engine of gamma-ray bursts (2017, background): “…events in the Universe and isotropically distributed over the sky (see e.g., Mészáros 2002; Zhang & Mészáros 2004; Zhang 2007; Gehrels et al. 2009; Kumar & Zhang 2015; Wang et al. 2015 for reviews), which are sorted into two categories, i.e., short- and long-duration GRBs (SGRBs and LGRBs,…”
- Formation of Double Neutron Star Systems (2017, background): “This late Xray activity is difficult to explain with the accretion of the torus or by the prolonged afterglow radiation produced by the interaction of the jet with the ambient medium (Kumar & Zhang 2015).”
- Extending the Search for Muon Neutrinos Coincident with Gamma-Ray Bursts in IceCube Data (2017, background): “…radiative efficiency of these models has long been suggested to be insufficient to yield the observed γ-ray spectra (Fan & Piran 2006; Zhang et al. 2007; Kumar & Zhang 2015)unless the distribution of shell Γfactors within the fireball is unrealistically broad(Beloborodov 2000; Kumar & Zhang 2015).”
- THE THIRD SWIFT BURST ALERT TELESCOPE GAMMA-RAY BURST CATALOG (2015, background): “Both the observational evidence and theoretical studies connect long GRBs (bursts with duration longer than ∼2 s) with the death of massive stars (see e.g., Woosley & Bloom 2006; Fryer et al. 2007; Gehrels & Mészáros 2012; Kumar & Zhang 2015, and references therein).”
- GRB hosts through cosmic time - VLT/X-Shooter emission-line spectroscopy of 96 γ-ray-burst-selected galaxies at 0.1 (2015, background): “The extreme luminosities of long γ-ray bursts (GRBs) and their afterglows (e.g., Gehrels et al. 2009; Kumar & Zhang 2015, for recent reviews) over the full electromagnetic spectrum make them powerful messengers from the early Universe, a potential that was identified very early on (e.g., Wijers et…”
- Fast radio bursts as synchrotron maser emission from decelerating relativistic blast waves (2019, background): “Although this overall evolution is well documented in the GRB literature (e.g. Kumar & Zhang 2015), we repeat it here for purposes of completeness.”
- A complete reference of the analytical synchrotron external shock models of gamma-ray bursts (2013, background): “Although the nature of the progenitor and central engine as well as the detailed physics of c-ray emission are still rather uncertain (for reviews, see e.g. Zhang and Mészáros, 2004; Piran, 2005; Mészáros, 2006; Zhang, 2007; Kumar and Zhang, 2013), a generic synchrotron external shock model has been”
- Constraining the Neutron Star Mass–Radius Relation and Dense Matter Equation of State with NICER. I. The Millisecond Pulsar X-Ray Data Set (2019, background): “…are highly sensitive to the interior structure of NSs (Shibata & Taniguchi 2011; Faber & Rasio 2012; Del Pozzo et al. 2013; Read et al. 2013; Lackey et al. 2014; Kumar & Zhang 2015; Rosswog 2015; Bauswein et al. 2016; Fernández & Metzger 2016; Janka et al. 2016; Oertel et al. 2017; Shibata 2016).”
- Transition from fireball to Poynting-flux-dominated outflow in the three-episode GRB 160625B (2016, methodology): “(1) It has three well-separated emission regions (the first, second and third sub-bursts).”
- A unified picture of Galactic and cosmological fast radio bursts (2020, background): “(A3) then gives tfrb ' tej/(2σ) (Kumar & Zhang 2015), which means the FRB duration is much shorter than the ejection duration if σ 1. the upstream composition must be dominated by electronpositron pairs4 with m ' me.”