Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era

By Bing Zhang. 2007

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the successful launch of NASA's dedicated gamma-ray burst (GRB) mission, Swift, the study of cosmological GRBs has entered a new era. Here I review the rapid observational and theoretical progress in this dynamical research field during the first two-year of the Swift mission, focusing on how observational breakthroughs have revolutionized our understanding of the physical origins of GRBs. Besides summarizing how Swift helps to solve some pre-Swift mysteries, I also list some outstanding problems raised by the Swift observations. An outlook of GRB science in the future, especially in the GLAST era, is briefly discussed.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6579fb94ebcbef49fbc791f7a420ba67f0b9e8d

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. Pawan Kumar
3. B. Metzger
4. E. Quataert
5. E. Berger
6. E. Liang
7. Binbin Zhang
8. A. Pe’er

Citations in the corpus

• Magnetic acceleration of ultrarelativistic jets in gamma-ray burst sources (2008, methodology): “Alternatively, it could be that the difficulties in finding late-time jet breaks in Swift sources are to a large extent observational (e.g. Zhang 2007), in which case other explanations for late-break candidates must be sought.”
• Detection of a Spectral Break in the Extra Hard Component of GRB 090926A (2011, background): “It has been widely believed that the afterglow is the synchrotron emission from the forward shock that propagates in the external medium, but Swift observations have pointed out some difficulties in this model (for recent reviews, Zhang 2007; Mészáros 2006).”
• CONSTRAINING GAMMA-RAY BURST INITIAL LORENTZ FACTOR WITH THE AFTERGLOW ONSET FEATURE AND DISCOVERY OF A TIGHT Γ0–Eγ,iso CORRELATION (2009, methodology): “The physics origin of the X-ray emission is still a mystery (e.g. Zhang 2007 for a review), although the consensus is that there might be diverse origins (Liang et al. 2007).”
• Magnetized relativistic jets and long-duration GRBs from magnetar spin-down during core-collapse supernovae (2009, background): “Moreover, the SNe associated with long-duration GRBs are not particularly unusual among the class of BL SN in terms of their energies, photospheric velocities and Ni masses (e.g. Soderberg 2006; Woosley & Bloom 2006).”
• The physics of gamma-ray bursts & relativistic jets (2014, background): “This launched a new era in the study of GRBs which has led to a wealth of new information and a much deeper understanding of these enigmatic explosions (e.g. Frail et al., 1997; Kulkarni et al., 1998; Bloom et al., 1999; Zhang and Mészáros, 2004; Piran, 2004; Zhang, 2007; Gehrels et al., 2009).”
• Evolution towards the critical limit and the origin of Be stars (2007, background): “Also such mass loss may be important in the process leading to the formation of a collapsar which is the most favoured model for the progenitors of the long Gamma Ray Bursts (Woosley 1993; Yoon & Langer 2005; Woosley & Heger 2006; Meynet & Maeder 2007).”
• The SEDs and host galaxies of the dustiest GRB afterglows (2011, background): “Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs, see e.g., Zhang 2007; Gehrels et al. 2009, for reviews) are linked to core-collapse supernovae, hence star formation via the death of massive stars (e.g., Galama et al. 1998; Hjorth et al. 2003).”
• A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF FERMI GAMMA-RAY BURST DATA. I. SPECTRAL COMPONENTS AND THE POSSIBLE PHYSICAL ORIGINS OF LAT/GBM GRBs (2010, background): “Since the non-thermal GRB spectra are expected to be curved (Mészáros et al. 1994; Pilla & Loeb 1998; Pe’er & Waxman 2004a; Razzaque et al. 2004; Pe’er et al. 2006; Gupta & Zhang 2007; Asano & Terasawa 2009), the existence of the PL component is not straightforwardly expected.”
• THE ULTRA-LONG GAMMA-RAY BURST 111209A: THE COLLAPSE OF A BLUE SUPERGIANT? (2012, background): “In fact, Swift J1644+57 did not show the characteristic GRB light curve behavior (so called steep-flat-steep, Zhang 2007) clearly visible in the case of GRB 111209A.”