Gamma-Ray Bursts
By Yun-Wei Yu, He Gao, Fayin Wang, Binbin Zhang. Stars and Stellar Processes, 2016
663 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) are short and intense bursts of $\sim$100 keV$-$1MeV photons, usually followed by long-lasting decaying afterglow emission in a wide range of electromagnetic wavelengths from radio to X-ray and, sometimes, even to GeV gamma-rays. These emissions are believed to originate from a relativistic jet, which is driven due to the collapse of special massive stars and the mergers of compact binaries (i.e., double neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole). This chapter first briefly introduces the basic observational facts of the GRB phenomena, including the prompt emission, afterglow emission, and host galaxies. Secondly, a general theoretical understanding of the GRB phenomena is described based on a relativistic jet's overall dynamical evolution, including the acceleration, propagation, internal dissipation, and deceleration phases. Here a long-lasting central engine of the GRBs can substantially influence the dynamical evolution of the jet. In addition, a supernova/kilonova emission can appear in the optical afterglow of some nearby GRBs, which can provide an important probe to the nature of the GRB progenitors. Finally, as luminous cosmological phenomena, it is expected to use GRBs to probe the early universe and to constrain the cosmological parameters.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88bc5cccfadcb11411d0a5a4131277dc281314aa
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- 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).”
- Extending the Search for Muon Neutrinos Coincident with Gamma-Ray Bursts in IceCube Data (2017, background): “The predominant model for GRB phenomenology involves the release of a relativistic fireball (Piran 2005; Fox & Mészáros 2006; Mészáros 2006)—a plasma of electrons, photons, and hadrons—that is triggered by a cataclysmic stellar collapse or binary system merger.”
- DETECTION OF GAMMA-RAY POLARIZATION IN PROMPT EMISSION OF GRB 100826A (2011, background): “Since the discovery of X-ray afterglow of GRBs by BeppoSAX (Costa et al. 1997) and the identification of optical counterparts at cosmological distance, many observational facts and theoretical works have led us to understand the nature of GRBs.”