THE ULTRA-LONG GAMMA-RAY BURST 111209A: THE COLLAPSE OF A BLUE SUPERGIANT?

By B. Gendre, G. Stratta, J. Atteia, S. Basa, M. Boer, D. Coward, S. Cutini, V. D’Elia, E. Howell, A. K. L. P. Asdcinaf and 10 more. 2012

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present optical, X-ray and gamma-ray observations of GRB 111209A, observed at a redshift of z = 0.677. We show that this event was active in its prompt phase for about 25000 s, making it the longest burst ever observed. This rare event could have been detected up to z ∼ 1.4 in gamma-rays. Compared to other long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), GRB 111209A is a clear outlier in the energy-fluence and duration plane. The high-energy prompt emission shows no sign of a strong blackbody component, the signature of a tidal disruption event, or a supernova shock breakout. Given the extreme longevity of this event, and lack of any significant observed supernova signature, we propose that GRB 111209A resulted from the core-collapse of a low-metallicity blue supergiant star. This scenario is favored because of the necessity to supply enough mass to the central engine over a duration of thousands of seconds. Hence, we suggest that GRB 111209A could have more in common with population III stellar explosions, rather than those associated with normal long GRBs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c469d54eb0b035a5148353d21c4989e3d2dd058b

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. E. Berger
3. B. Metzger
4. Pawan Kumar
5. B. Margalit
6. W. Fong
7. E. Quataert
8. D. Kasen

Citations in the corpus

• Swift J1112.2−8238: a candidate relativistic tidal disruption flare (2015, background): “While multiple possible paths to their creation have been suggested (e.g. Thöne et al. 2011; Campana et al. 2011; Gendre et al. 2013), it is also possible that they are related to TDFs with a relativistic component, although in this case their shorter timescales would imply a white dwarf…”
• The diversity of transients from magnetar birth in core collapse supernovae (2015, background): “This is usually only minutes for the compact Wolf-Rayet progenitors of normal LGRBs, but can be months or longer for blue super-giants (Quataert & Kasen 2012; Woosley & Heger 2012; Gendre et al. 2013).”
• THE THIRD SWIFT BURST ALERT TELESCOPE GAMMA-RAY BURST CATALOG (2015, background): “Studies usually refer “ultra-long GRBs” to bursts with durations kiloseconds (e.g., Gendre et al. 2013; Stratta et al. 2013; Evans et al. 2014; Levan et al. 2014; Boër et al. 2015), however, no unified definition has been adopted.”
• 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 temporal properties were used to postulate a new class of GRBs (Gendre et al. 2013; Levan et al. 2014b), a result questioned by Virgili et al. (2013).”
• An Embedded X-Ray Source Shines through the Aspherical AT 2018cow: Revealing the Inner Workings of the Most Luminous Fast-evolving Optical Transients (2018, background): “…which are central-engine-powered explosions, and in ultralong GRBs (Stratta et al. 2013; Bellm et al. 2014), for which the connection to blue supergiant progenitors has already been suggested (e.g., Quataert & Kasen 2012; Gendre et al. 2013; Nakauchi et al. 2013; Wu et al. 2013; Liu et al. 2018).”
• The physics of gamma-ray bursts & relativistic jets (2014, background): “Another potential sub-category of massive star GRBs was proposed to inter- pret several “ultra-long” GRBs (e.g. Gendre et al., 2013; Levan et al., 2014).”