Gamma-ray bursts as standard candles to constrain the cosmological parameters
By G. Ghirlanda, G. Ghisellini, C. F. I. D. Astronomia, Unam, Mexico. 2006
149 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the most powerful sources in the Universe: they emit up to 1054 erg in the hard x-ray band in a few tens of seconds. The cosmological origin of GRBs has been confirmed by several spectroscopic measurements of their redshifts, distributed in the range z∊(0.1,6.3). These two properties make GRBs very appealing for investigating the far Universe. Indeed, they can be used to constrain the geometry of the present-day Universe and the nature and evolution of dark energy by testing the cosmological models in a redshift range hardly achievable by other cosmological probes. Moreover, the use of GRBs as cosmological tools could unveil the ionization history of the Universe, the inter-galactic medium (IGM) properties and the formation of massive stars in the early Universe. The energetics implied by the observed fluences and redshifts span at least four orders of magnitudes. Therefore, at first sight, GRBs are all but standard candles. But there are correlations among some observed quantities which allow us to know the total energy or the peak luminosity emitted by a specific burst with a great accuracy. Through these correlations, GRBs become ‘known’ candles, and then a new tool to constrain the cosmological parameters. One of these correlation is between the rest frame peak spectral energy Epeak and the total energy emitted in γ-rays Eγ, properly corrected for the collimation factor. Another correlation, discovered very recently, relates the total GRB luminosity Liso, its peak spectral energy Epeak and a characteristic timescale T0.45, related to the variability of the prompt emission. This last correlation is based only on prompt emission properties, it is completely phenomenological, model independent and assumption-free. These correlations have been already used to constrain ΩM and ΩΛ, which are found to be consistent with the concordance model. The present limited sample of bursts and the lack of low redshift events, necessary to calibrate the correlations used to standardize GRBs energetics, make the cosmological constraints obtained with GRBs still large compared to those obtained with other cosmological probes (e.g. SNIa or CMB). However, the newly born field of GRB-cosmology is very promising for the future.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f01e893c52f2e549f73928da1e8c37c9ef8174d5
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Citations in the corpus
- A complete sample of bright Swift long gamma-ray bursts: testing the spectral-energy correlations (2011, unknown): “2004a; Ghirlanda et al. 2006).”
- Gamma-ray bursts in the comoving frame (2011, methodology): “To estimate the jet opening angles we considered the most updated “Ghirlanda” correlation, which comprises 29 GRBs with measured jet break time (Ghirlanda et al. 2006).”
- A Cosmology-Independent Calibration of Gamma-Ray Burst Luminosity Relations and the Hubble Diagram (2008, background): “In recent years, several empirical GRB luminosity relations have been proposed as distance indicators (see e.g. Ghirlanda et al. 2006a; Schaefer (2007) for reviews), such as the luminosity-spectral lag (L-τlag) relation (Norris, Marani, & Bonnell 2000), the luminosity-variability (L-V ) relation…”
- Extremely energetic Fermi Gamma-Ray Bursts obey spectral energy correlations (2009, unknown): “…observational evidence involve the physics and geometry of the prompt emission, the identification and understanding of di ff erent subclasses of GRBs (e.g., short, sub-energetic), and the use of GRBs to estimate cosmological parameters (Amati 2006a; Ghirlanda et al. 2006; Amati et al. 2007, 2008).”
- Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “GRBs are extremely diverse and highly beamed, but they exhibit correlations (Amati, 2006; Ghirlanda et al., 2006) between equivalent isotropic energy and spectral properties (such as the energy of peak intensity) or variability.”
- Measuring the cosmological parameters with the Ep,i–Eiso correlation of gamma-ray bursts (2008, methodology): “These analyses have provided useful constraints on ΩM and ΩΛ consistent with those derived from type Ia SNe, see, e.g., Ghirlanda et al. (2006) for a review.”
- A HUBBLE DIAGRAM FOR QUASARS (2015, background): “The main advantage of this method is clearly the possibility of testing the cosmological model and measuring the cosmological parameters over a wider redshift range than any other cosmological probe, with the possible exception of gamma-ray bursts (Ghirlanda et al. 2006).”