Panchromatic study of GRB 060124: From precursor to afterglow

By P. Romano, S. Campana, G. Chincarini, J. Cummings, G. Cusumano, S. T. Holland, V. Mangano, T. Mineo, K. L. Page, V. Pal'shin and 28 more. 2006

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present observations of GRB 060124, the first event for which both the prompt and the afterglow emission could be observed simultaneously and in their entirety by the three Swift instruments. Indeed, Swift-BAT triggered on a precursor " 570 s before the main burst peak, and this allowed Swift to repoint the narrow field instruments to the burst position " 350 s before the main burst occurred. GRB 060124 also triggered Konus-Wind, which observed the prompt emission in a harder gamma-ray band (up to 2 MeV). Thanks to these exceptional circumstances, the temporal and spectral properties of the prompt emission can be studied in the optical, X-ray and gamma-ray ranges. While the X-ray emission (0.2-10 keV) clearly tracks the gamma-ray burst, the optical component follows a di! erent pattern, likely indicating a di! erent origin, possibly the onset of external shocks. The prompt GRB spectrum shows significant spectral evolution, with both the peak energy and the spectral index varying. As observed in several long GRBs, significant lags are measured between the hard- and low-energy components, showing that this behaviour extends over 3 decades in energy. The GRB peaks are also much broader at soft energies. This is related to the temporal evolution of the spectrum, and can be accounted for by assuming that the electron spectral index softened with time. The burst energy (Eiso " 5 # 10 53 erg) and average peak energy (Ep " 300 keV) make GRB060124 consistent with theAmati relation. TheX-ray afterglow ischaracterized by adecay which presents a break at tb " 10 5 s.

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Citations in the corpus

• Unveiling the origin of X-ray flares in gamma-ray bursts (2010, methodology): “The first detection of flares with the Swift/XRT occurred in X-Ray Flash (XRF) 050406 (Burrows et al. 2005b; Romano et al. 2006b) and GRB050502B (Burrows et al. 2005b; Falcone et al. 2006).”
• Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era (2007, background): “The X-ray flares have the following observational properties (Burrows et al. 2005b; Falcone et al. 2006; Romano et al. 2006a; Chincarini et al. 2007; Burrows et al. 2007, see Fig.”
• LOW-RESOLUTION SPECTROSCOPY OF GAMMA-RAY BURST OPTICAL AFTERGLOWS: BIASES IN THE SWIFT SAMPLE AND CHARACTERIZATION OF THE ABSORBERS (2009, background): “A detailed dis ussion of the prompt emission and afterglow of this burst an befound in Romano et al. (2006).”
• The First Swift BAT Gamma-Ray Burst Catalog (2007, background): “These histograms have an 80 channel spectrum for each detector integrated typically over 5 minutes.16 The DPHs are the primary data product when the GRB prompt emission lasts longer than the stop time of the event data collection (e.g., GRB 060124; Romano et al. 2006).”
• Swift Observations of GRB 070110: An Extraordinary X-Ray Afterglow Powered by the Central Engine (2007, background): “Previous Swift observations of X-ray flares (Burrows et al. 2005b; Barthelmy et al. 2005b; Falcone et al. 2006; Romano et al. 2006; Campana et al. 2006; Cusumano et al. 2006, 2007) have revealed that the GRB central engine can indeed be active to such a late epoch.”
• REM observations of GRB 060418 and GRB 060607A: the onset of the afterglow and the initial fireball Lorentz factor determination (2006, background): “The simplest case is a light curveshaped by the forward shock only, as could be the case for GRB 030418 (Rykoff et al. 2004) and GRB 060124 (Romano et al. 2006), but the lack of a measured redshift in the former case and the poor sampling in the latter prevented to derive firm conclusions.”
• An online repository of Swift/XRT light curves of Γ-ray bursts (2007, methodology): “Pile-up in the Swift XRT has been discussed by Romano et al. (2006) for WT mode and Vaughan et al. (2006) and Pagani et al. (2006) for PC mode.”
• Methods and results of an automatic analysis of a complete sample of Swift-XRT observations of GRBs (2008, methodology): “For alternative 2 Part of the XRT software, distributed with the HEASOFT package: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/lheasoft/ methods of identifying and eliminating pile up, see Vaughan et al. (2006) or Romano et al. (2006).”
• DISCERNING THE PHYSICAL ORIGINS OF COSMOLOGICAL GAMMA-RAY BURSTS BASED ON MULTIPLE OBSERVATIONAL CRITERIA: THE CASES OF z = 6.7 GRB 080913, z = 8.2 GRB 090423, AND SOME SHORT/HARD GRBs (2009, background): “Observationally, pulse widths at high energies tend to be narrower than those at low energies (Ford et al 1995; Romano et al. 2006; Page et al. 2007).”
• A Comprehensive Analysis of Swift XRT Data. II. Diverse Physical Origins of the Shallow Decay Segment (2007, methodology): “Our code first runs the XRT tool xrtpipeline to reproduce the XRT clean event data, and then makes pile-up corrections with the same methods as discussed in Romano et al. (2006) (for the Window Timing [WT] mode data) and Vaughan et al. (2006) (for the Photon Counting [PC] mode data).”
• THE ULTRA-LONG GAMMA-RAY BURST 111209A: THE COLLAPSE OF A BLUE SUPERGIANT? (2012, methodology): “As a consequence, spectra and light curves were extracted using the methods of Romano et al. (2006) and Vaughan et al. (2006), excluding a central circle of radius 1 pixels from the point-spread function (PSF) in WT mode; for the PC mode, the radius was set dynamically between 7 and 1 pixels as a…”