Radio faint GRB afterglows Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA)/ CAASTRO – The University of Sydney Dr. Paul Hancock with Bryan Gaensler, Tara Murphy, and Davide Burlon
Overview ›Intro to GRBs ›Radio properties of GRBs ›Radio detection rate 3
Gamma Ray Bursts ›Intense bursts of gamma-rays detected by satellites such as Swift / FERMI ›Associated with the core collapse of massive stars 4
GRB afterglows ›Long GRBs associated with SNIbc T Totani Piran, 2003, Nature, 422, 268
Only 30% of GRBs are detected at radio frequencies ›304 GRBs observed (VLA+ATCA) ›Only 30% have a detected radio afterglow ›Detections and upper limits overlap in flux 6 GRB980703A GRB980329A Days Since Burst "Typical" Bright Chandra&Frail 2012
Sensitivity limitations? ›Assumption is that detection rate is a function of sensitivity. ›Implicitly: -There is a single population of GRBs -Flux (Luminosity) distribution may be broad but is single peaked -Better sensitivity would result in more detections ›Thus -The destinction between bright/faint is artificial -the mean flux of the faint GRBs is not far below this artificial divide 7
Redshift distribution 8
Parameter distributions keV X-ray Flux (erg/cm 2 /s) Redshift No-Redshift R-band optical flux (μJy) Cumulative Fraction Redshift No-Redshift Gamma ray Fluence (erg/cm 2 ) Redshift No-Redshift
Conclusion ›The detection rate is NOT being biased by -Differences in redshift distribution -Our ability to measure redshift 10
The effect of limited sensitivity 11
1x 12 hour observation SNR ~ 5 Visibility stacking 12 12x 1 hour observations SNR ~ 1 For a population of sources, visibility stacking can measure the (weighted) mean flux of the population. Hancock et al., 2011, ApJ,735, L35
Stacking Results times brighter
What flux would we have expected? 14
Producing a model flux distribution 15 Luminosity ModelsFlux Distribution=> Redshift Distribution =>
Model predictions 16
Stacked observations Consistent with predictions ~5x fainter than predictions
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Radio faint afterglows are fainter at early times too! keV X-ray Flux (erg/cm 2 /s) Bright Faint Beaming-corrected Gamma-ray Energy (erg) Bright Faint Median-TimeBrightFaint Radio* (mJy)0-5d4< 0.03 R-band (μJy)11h X-ray (erg/cm 2 /s)11h Gamma-ray (x10 52 erg)sec-min102 R-band optical flux (μJy) Bright Faint Cumulative Fraction GRBs with radio faint afterglows are less luminous at all wavelengths * radio data is mean not median
Two (more) populations of GRBs ›Long-soft GRBs are either radio bright or radio faint ›There are intrinsic differences between the bright and faint GRBs 21
A spectral break leads to dark/faint GRBs 22 Piran, 1999, Phys.Rep, 314, 575Greiner et al., 2010, A&A, 526, A30