An exceptionally bright flare from SGR 1806–20 and the origins of short-duration γ-ray bursts

By K. Hurley, S. Boggs, Steven E. Boggs, David M. Smith, Robert C. Duncan, R. Lin, A. Zoglauer, S. Krucker, G. Hurford, H. S. Hudson and 11 more. Nature, 2005

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soft-γ-ray repeaters (SGRs) are galactic X-ray stars that emit numerous short-duration (about 0.1 s) bursts of hard X-rays during sporadic active periods. They are thought to be magnetars: strongly magnetized neutron stars with emissions powered by the dissipation of magnetic energy. Here we report the detection of a long (380 s) giant flare from SGR 1806–20, which was much more luminous than any previous transient event observed in our Galaxy. (In the first 0.2 s, the flare released as much energy as the Sun radiates in a quarter of a million years.) Its power can be explained by a catastrophic instability involving global crust failure and magnetic reconnection on a magnetar, with possible large-scale untwisting of magnetic field lines outside the star. From a great distance this event would appear to be a short-duration, hard-spectrum cosmic γ-ray burst. At least a significant fraction of the mysterious short-duration γ-ray bursts may therefore come from extragalactic magnetars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe2ce264ad316768f80cf149dfd1e00d25003388

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
3. E. Berger
4. E. Quataert
5. D. Kasen
6. E. Nakar
7. Pawan Kumar
8. T. Thompson

Citations in the corpus

• Cosmological Fast Radio Bursts from Binary Neutron Star Mergers (2013, background): “…repeaters (SGRs) are suggested as a promising candidate by Popov & Postnov (2007) and Thornton et al. (2013), because of the event rate consistent with that of FRBs (Ofek 2007) and sufficient total energy to explain the FRB radio flux (Hurley et al. 2005; Palmer et al. 2005; Terasawa et al. 2005).”
• Physics of strongly magnetized neutron stars (2006, background): “Although transient radio emission has been detected following superflares of SGR1900+14 (Frail et al 1999) and SGR1806-20 (Gaensler et al 2005), as well as the outburst of AXP XTE J1810-197 (Halpern et al 2005), no persistent pulsed radio emission has been detected from any SGRs or AXPs.”
• THE AFTERGLOWS OF SWIFT-ERA GAMMA-RAY BURSTS. II. TYPE I GRB VERSUS TYPE II GRB OPTICAL AFTERGLOWS (2008, background): “…2007a): In analogy to Type Ia and Type II supernovae, GRBs can be classified 1Note that we do not consider the “superflares” of Soft Gamma-Repeaters (SGRs) in this work, which have also been suggested as a source for part of the short GRB population (e.g., Hurley et al. 2005; Palmer et al. 2005).”
• Colloquium : nonlinear collective interactions in quantum plasmas with degenerate electron fluids (2010, background): “…ES and EM waves due to nonlinear quantum effects in a nonuniform quantum magnetoplasma with an arbitrary electron pressure degeneracy should provide clues to the origin of very intense X-rays (Coe et al., 1978) and gamma rays (Hurley et al., 2005) from both astrophysical and laboratory plasmas.”
• Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era (2009, background): “It has been noted (Hurley et al. 2005, Palmer et al. 2005, Nakar et al. 2006b) that the giant flare (GF) observed from the putative galactic magnetar source SGR1806-20 in December 2004 (Gaensler et al. 2005) could have looked like a typical short GRB had it occurred much farther away, thus making…”
• Corona of Magnetars (2006, background): “In particular, the occurence of enormously energetic X-ray flares in SGRs points to internal magnetic fields approaching ∼ 1016 G (Hurley et al. 2005).”
• Neutron star asteroseismology. Axial crust oscillations in the Cowling approximation (2006, unknown): “SGR 1806−20: Erupted December 27 2004 (Hurley et al. 2005; Palmer 2005).”
• Magnetic Reconnection in Astrophysical and (2009, background): “…classed as anomalous X-ray pulsars and as soft gamma repeaters also flare, SGR 1806-20 being a particularly dramatic example (Kaspi et al. 2003, Hurley et al. 2005), pointing to rapid release of magnetic energy, possibly through reconnection (Thompson & Duncan 1995, Lyutikov 2003, Schwartz et…”
• Five new fast radio bursts from the HTRU high-latitude survey at Parkes: First evidence for two-component bursts (2015, background): “…Thornton et al. 2013; Kulkarni et al. 2014) The initial gamma-ray burst usually lasts just a fraction of a second, and is then followed by hard X-ray emission with power modulated at what is thought to be the spin period of the underlying neutron star (e.g. Hurley et al. 2005; Palmer et al. 2005).”
• Electromagnetic counterparts of compact object mergers powered by the radioactive decay of r‐process nuclei (2010, background): “Despite these suggestive hints, however, it is not yet established that all short GRBs are uniquely associated with NS-NS/NS-BH mergers (e.g. Hurley et al. 2005; Metzger, Quataert & Thompson 2008) nor that all mergers lead to an energetic GRB.”
• Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era (2007, background): “…event from SGR 1800–20 has a luminosity(3.7 ± 0.9) × 1046d215 erg s −1 (whered15 is the distance of the source in units of 15 kpc), suggesting ahigh detectability of similar events up to30d15 Mpc, which would contribute to a significant fraction of BATSE short-hard bursts (Hurley et al. 2005).”
• Short-hard gamma-ray bursts (2007, background): “With a luminosity of ∼ 1047 erg/s such flares can be detected by BATSE up to ≈ 50 Mpc, suggesting that a significant fraction of the BATSE SHB sample is comprised of similar extra-galactic flares (Dar, 2005a,b; Palmer et al. , 2005; Hurley et al. , 2005; Nakar et al. , 2006).”