Hendrik van Eerten

Gamma-ray bursts are observed off-axis

We constrain the jet opening angle and, for the first time, the off-axis observer angle for gamma-ray bursts in the Swift-XRT catalog by using the ScaleFit package to fit afterglow light curves directly to hydrodynamic simulations. The ScaleFit model uses scaling relations in the hydrodynamic and radiation equations to compute synthetic light curves directly from a set of high-resolution two-dimensional relativistic blast wave simulations. The data sample consists of all Swift-XRT afterglows from 2005 to 2012 with sufficient coverage and a known redshift, 226 bursts in total. We find that the jet half-opening angle varies widely but is commonly less than 0.1 rad. The distribution of the electron spectral index is also broad, with a median at 2.30. We find the observer angle to have a median value of 0.57 of the jet opening angle over our sample, which has profound consequences for the predicted rate of observed jet breaks and affects the beaming-corrected total energies of gamma-ray bursts.

AN ANALYSIS OFCHANDRADEEP FOLLOW-UP GAMMA-RAY BURSTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR OFF-AXIS JETS

This work was supported by SAO contract SV4-74018, NASA contract NAS5-00136, and by SAO grants AR3-14005X, GO1-12102X, and GO3-14067X. H.V.E., G.S.R., and A.M. acknowledge the support by NASA TM3-14005X and NNX13AO93G.

Self-similar relativistic blast waves with energy injection

A sufficiently powerful astrophysical source with power-law luminosity in time will give rise to a self-similar relativistic blast wave with a reverse shock travelling into the ejecta and a forward shock moving into the surrounding medium. Once energy injection ceases and the last energy is delivered to the shock front, the blast wave will transit into another self-similar stage depending only on the total amount of energy injected. I describe the effect of limited duration energy injection into environments with density depending on radius as a power law, emphasizing optical/X-ray Gamma-ray Burst afterglows as applications. The blast wave during injection is treated analytically, the transition following last energy injection with one-dimensional simulations. Flux equations for synchrotron emission from the forward and reverse shock regions are provided. The reverse shock emission can easily dominate, especially with different magnetizations for both regions. Reverse shock emission is shown to support both the reported X-ray and optical correlations between afterglow plateau duration and end time flux, independently of the luminosity power-law slope. The model is demonstrated by application to bursts 120521A and 090515, and can accommodate their steep post-plateau light-curve slopes.

The sharpness of gamma-ray burst prompt emission spectra

We aim to obtain a measure of the curvature of time-resolved spectra that can be compared directly to theory. This tests the ability of models such as synchrotron emission to explain the peaks or breaks of GBM prompt emission spectra. We take the burst sample from the official Fermi GBM GRB time-resolved spectral catalog. We re-fit all spectra with a measured peak or break energy in the catalog best-fit models in various energy ranges, which cover the curvature around the spectral peak or break, resulting in a total of 1,113 spectra being analysed. We compute the sharpness angles under the peak or break of the triangle constructed under the model fit curves and compare to the values obtained from various representative emission models: blackbody, single-electron synchrotron, synchrotron emission from a Maxwellian or power-law electron distribution. We find that 35% of the time-resolved spectra are inconsistent with the single-electron synchrotron function, and 91% are inconsistent with the Maxwellian synchrotron function. The single temperature, single emission time and location blackbody function is found to be sharper than all the spectra. No general evolutionary trend of the sharpness angle is observed, neither per burst nor for the whole population. It is found that the limiting case, a single temperature Maxwellian synchrotron function, can only contribute up to

The Fermi GBM gamma-ray burst time-resolved spectral catalog: brightest bursts in the first four years

58^{+23}_{-18}

An Analysis of Chandra Deep Follow-up GRBs: Implications for Off-Axis Jets

% of the peak flux. Our results show that even the sharpest but non-realistic case, the single-electron synchrotron function, cannot explain a large fraction of the observed GRB prompt spectra. Because of the fact that any combination of physically possible synchrotron spectra added together will always further broaden the spectrum, emission mechanisms other than optically thin synchrotron radiation are likely required in a full explanation of the spectral peaks or breaks of the GRB prompt emission phase.

An analysis of Chandra deep follow-up gamma-ray bursts: implications for off-axis jets

We aim to obtain high-quality time-resolved spectral fits of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) observed by the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. We perform time-resolved spectral analysis with high temporal and spectral resolution of the brightest bursts observed by Fermi GBM in its first 4 years of mission. We present the complete catalog containing 1,491 spectra from 81 bursts with high spectral and temporal resolution. Distributions of parameters, statistics of the parameter populations, parameter-parameter and parameter-uncertainty correlations, and their exact values are obtained and presented as main results in this catalog. We report a criterion that is robust enough to automatically distinguish between different spectral evolutionary trends between bursts. We also search for plausible blackbody emission components and find that only 3 bursts (36 spectra in total) show evidence of a pure Planck function. It is observed that the averaged time-resolved low-energy power-law index and peak energy are slightly harder than the time-integrated values. Time-resolved spectroscopic results should be used when interpreting physics from the observed spectra, instead of the time-integrated results.

Off‐Axis Afterglow Light Curves from High‐Resolution Hydrodynamical Jet Simulations

This work was supported by SAO contract SV4-74018, NASA contract NAS5-00136, and by SAO grants AR3-14005X, GO1-12102X, and GO3-14067X. H.V.E., G.S.R., and A.M. acknowledge the support by NASA TM3-14005X and NNX13AO93G.

The Spectral Sharpness Angle of Gamma-ray Bursts

This work was supported by SAO contract SV4-74018, NASA contract NAS5-00136, and by SAO grants AR3-14005X, GO1-12102X, and GO3-14067X. H.V.E., G.S.R., and A.M. acknowledge the support by NASA TM3-14005X and NNX13AO93G.

An on‐line library of afterglow light curves

Numerical jet simulations serve a valuable role in calculating gamma‐ray burst afterglow emission beyond analytical approximations. Here we present the results of high resolution 2D simulations of decelerating relativistic jets performed using the RAM adaptive mesh refinement relativistic hydrodynamics code. We have applied a separate synchrotron radiation code to the simulation results in order to calculate light curves at frequencies varying from radio to X‐ray for observers at various angles from the jet axis. We provide a confirmation from radio light curves from simulations rather than from a simplified jet model for earlier results in the literature finding that only a very small number of local Ibc supernovae can possibly harbor an orphan afterglow.Also, recent studies have noted an unexpected lack of observed jet breaks in the Swift sample. Using a jet simulation with physical parameters representative for an average Swift sample burst, such as a jet half opening angle of 0.1 rad and a source reds...