A tale of two mergers: constraints on kilonova detection in two short GRBs at z ∼ 0.5
Creators
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1.
University of Maryland, College Park
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2.
Istituto di Radioastronomia di Bologna
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3.
George Washington University
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4.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
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5.
Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics
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6.
California Institute of Technology
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7.
Aoyama Gakuin University
Abstract
We present a detailed multiwavelength analysis of two short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs) detected by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory: GRB 160624A at z = 0.483 and GRB 200522A at z = 0.554. These sGRBs demonstrate very different properties in their observed emission and environment. GRB 160624A is associated with a late-type galaxy with an old stellar population (≈3 Gyr) and moderate ongoing star formation (≈1 M_⊙ yr⁻¹). Hubble and Gemini limits on optical/near-infrared emission from GRB 160624A are among the most stringent for sGRBs, leading to tight constraints on the allowed kilonova properties. In particular, we rule out any kilonova brighter than AT2017gfo, disfavouring large masses of wind ejecta (≲0.03 M_⊙). In contrast, observations of GRB 200522A uncovered a luminous (L_(F125W) ≈ 10⁴² erg s⁻¹ at 2.3 d) and red (r − H ≈ 1.3 mag) counterpart. The red colour can be explained either by bright kilonova emission powered by the radioactive decay of a large amount of wind ejecta (0.03 M_⊙ ≲ M ≲ 0.1 M_⊙) or moderate extinction, E(B − V) ≈ 0.1−0.2 mag, along the line of sight. The location of this sGRB in the inner regions of a young (≈0.1 Gyr) star-forming (≈2−6 M_⊙ yr⁻¹) galaxy and the limited sampling of its counterpart do not allow us to rule out dust effects as contributing, at least in part, to the red colour.
Additional Information
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Accepted 2021 January 13. Received 2020 December 28; in original form 2020 November 2. The authors would like to acknowledge the anonymous referee for useful comments that improved the manuscript. BO acknowledges Paz Beniamini and Amy Lien for useful discussions. BO, ET, and SD were supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through grants NNX16AB66G, NNX17AB18G, and 80NSSC20K0389. EAC acknowledges financial support from the IDEAS Fellowship, a research traineeship program funded by the National Science Foundation under grant DGE-1450006. Partial support to this work was provided by the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme under the AHEAD2020 project (grant 871158). GR acknowledges support from the University of Maryland through the Joint Space Science Institute Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship. The work of EAC, CLF, RTW, CJF, and OK was supported by the US Department of Energy through the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is operated by Triad National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of US Department of Energy (Contract No. 89233218CNA000001). This work used data supplied by the UK Swift Science Data Centre at the University of Leicester. The scientific results reported in this article are based on observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. This research has used software provided by the Chandra X-ray Center in the application package CIAO. Based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF's OIR Lab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). The HST data used in this work were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). STScI is operated by the AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX09AF08G and by other grants and contracts. These results also used Lowell Observatory's Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT), formerly the Discovery Channel Telescope. Lowell operates the LDT in partnership with Boston University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Toledo. Partial support of the LDT was provided by Discovery Communications. LMI was built by Lowell Observatory using funds from the National Science Foundation (AST-1005313). We additionally used ASTROPY, a community-developed core PYTHON package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2018). The afterglow modelling was performed in part on the George Washington University Pegasus computer cluster and on the YORP cluster administered by the Center for Theory and Computation, which is part of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland (UMD). DATA AVAILABILITY. The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.Attached Files
Published - stab132.pdf
Accepted Version - 2012.00026.pdf
Supplemental Material - stab132_supplemental_file.pdf
Files
2012.00026.pdf
Additional details
Additional titles
- Alternative title
- A tale of two mergers: constraints on kilonova detection in two short GRBs at z~0.5
Identifiers
- Eprint ID
- 112480
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20211215-622365000
Related works
- Describes
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00026 (URL)
Funding
- NASA
- NNX16AB66G
- NASA
- NNX17AB18G
- NASA
- 80NSSC20K0389
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- DGE-1450006
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 871158
- University of Maryland
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- 89233218CNA000001
- NASA
- NAS5-26555
- NASA
- NNX09AF08G
- Discovery Communications
- NSF
- AST-1005313
Dates
- Created
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2021-12-16Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-12-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field