OFF-AXIS GAMMA-RAY BURST AFTERGLOW MODELING BASED ON A TWO-DIMENSIONAL AXISYMMETRIC HYDRODYNAMICS SIMULATION

By H. V. van Eerten, Weiqun Zhang, A. MacFadyen. 2010

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Starting as highly relativistic collimated jets, gamma-ray burst outflows gradually slow down and become nonrelativistic spherical blast waves. Although detailed analytical solutions describing the afterglow emission received by an on-axis observer during both the early and late phases of the outflow evolution exist, a calculation of the received flux during the intermediate phase and for an off-axis observer requires either a more simplified analytical model or direct numerical simulations of the outflow dynamics. In this paper, we present light curves for off-axis observers covering the long-term evolution of the blast wave, calculated from a high-resolution two-dimensional relativistic hydrodynamics simulation using a synchrotron radiation model. We compare our results to earlier analytical work and calculate the consequence of the observer angle with respect to the jet axis both for the detection of orphan afterglows and for jet break fits to the observational data. We confirm earlier results in the literature finding that only a very small number of local type Ibc supernovae can harbor an orphan afterglow. For off-axis observers, the observable jet break can be delayed up to several weeks, potentially leading to overestimation of the beaming-corrected total energy. In addition we find that, when using our off-axis light curves to create synthetic Swift X-ray data, jet breaks are likely to remain hidden in the data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac4a5da6cd837eede7e60b3710b2c434d93f945a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
3. E. Berger
4. Pawan Kumar
5. A. Pe’er
6. W. Fong
7. F. Ryde
8. L. Amati

In Atmospheric Science

1. B. Metzger
2. Luciano Rezzolla
3. W. Fong
4. Raffaella Margutti
5. T. Piran
6. E. Berger
7. B. Zauderer
8. B. Margalit

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Bing Zhang
2. E. Berger
3. G. Ghisellini
4. Pawan Kumar
5. L. Amati
6. B. Metzger
7. G. Ghirlanda
8. T. Piran

Citations in the corpus

• The Proto-Magnetar Model for Gamma-Ray Bursts (2010, unknown): “…Etot for a sample of well-studied bursts (Cenko et al. 2010b,a), the results of these studies are hindered at present by simplifying assumptions in the afterglow modeling and jet structure, which may lead to systematic overestimates in Etot (e.g. Zhang & MacFadyen 2009; van Eerten et al. 2010).”
• The Electromagnetic Counterpart of the Binary Neutron Star Merger LIGO/Virgo GW170817. VI. Radio Constraints on a Relativistic Jet and Predictions for Late-time Emission from the Kilonova Ejecta (2017, methodology): “To constrain the value of qobs, we use the afterglow modeling code BOXFIT (v2; van Eerten et al. 2010; van Eerten & MacFadyen 2012) for a wide range of kinetic energies, densities, jet opening angles, observer orientations, and B, as described in Margutti et al. (2017); we fix = 0.1e .”
• Millisecond Magnetar Birth Connects FRB 121102 to Superluminous Supernovae and Long-duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2017, background): “Figure 5 compares the 8.6 GHz off-axis LGRB afterglow models of van Eerten et al. (2010) for different viewing angles θobs relative to the axis of the jet to the cur- rent flux of the quiescent radio source associated with FRB 121102 (gold line).”
• The THESEUS space mission concept: science case, design and expected performances (2017, background): “One expected EM component is the late afterglow from the laterally spreading jet as soon as it decelerates (“orphan afterglows”; van Eerten et al., 2010).”
• The Electromagnetic Counterpart of the Binary Neutron Star Merger LIGO/Virgo GW170817. V. Rising X-Ray Emission from an Off-axis Jet (2017, methodology): “To this aim, we run the publicly available code BOXFIT (v2; van Eerten et al. 2010; van Eerten & MacFadyen 2012), varying Ek, n, p, B, and qj (jet opening angle) and calculate the off-axis afterglow emission as observed from different lines of sight qobs, with qobs varying from 5 to 90 (i.e.,…”
• A DECADE OF SHORT-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURST BROADBAND AFTERGLOWS: ENERGETICS, CIRCUMBURST DENSITIES, AND JET OPENING ANGLES (2015, background): “2002; van Eerten et al. 2010) and long-lived radio flares from mildly relativistic ejecta (Nakar & Piran 2011).”
• WHAT IS THE MOST PROMISING ELECTROMAGNETIC COUNTERPART OF A NEUTRON STAR BINARY MERGER? (2011, unknown): “…and Fong et al. (2011a), expressed in luminosity and in apparent magnitude for a source at a distance of 200 Mpc. Shown for comparison are on-axis SGRB afterglow models with θobs ≈ θj from van Eerten & MacFadyen (2011) 9 (see also van Eerten et al. 2010) that span the range of detected afterglows.”