English

Extremely luminous optical afterglow of an energetic gamma-ray burst GRB 230204B

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2025-12-03 v2

Abstract

Robotic telescope networks play an important role in capturing early and bright optical afterglows, providing critical insights into the energetics and emission mechanisms of GRBs. In this study, we analyze GRB 230204B, an exceptionally energetic and multi-pulsed long GRB, detected by the Fermi GBM and MAXI detectors, with an isotropic equivalent gamma-ray energy exceeding 1054^{54} erg. Time-resolved spectral analysis reveals a transition in the prompt emission from hard (sub-photospheric dominated) spectra during early pulses to softer (synchrotron radiation dominated) spectra in later pulses, indicative of a hybrid jet composition. We report the discovery and characterization of the optical afterglow using the MASTER and BOOTES robotic telescope networks, which enabled rapid follow-up observations starting at \sim1.3 ks post-burst. The optical luminosity at this time was exceptionally high, surpassing that of many other optically bright GRBs, such as GRB 990123, GRB 080319B, etc. This places the burst among the most luminous optical GRBs observed to date. Long-term radio observations extending to 335 days post-burst were conducted with the ATCA. Multi-wavelength modeling was conducted using an external ISM forward-shock top-hat jet model with \sw{afterglowpy}. The results reveal a narrow and highly collimated jet with a circumburst density of n0n_{0} \sim 28.12 cm3^{-3}, kinetic energy EKE_{\rm K} \sim 4.18 ×1055\times 10^{55} erg, and a relatively low value of ϵB\epsilon_{B} = 2.14 ×106\times 10^{-6}, indicating shock-compression of magnetic field in the surrounding interstellar medium. We constrained a low radiative efficiency of \sim 4.3 \%. This study highlights the indispensable contribution of robotic networks to early afterglow observations and advances our understanding of GRB 230204B unique characteristics and underlying jet physics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.18152,
  title  = {Extremely luminous optical afterglow of an energetic gamma-ray burst GRB 230204B},
  author = {Rahul Gupta and Judith Racusin and Vladimir Lipunov and Y. -D. Hu and Ashna Gulati and Alberto J. Castro-Tirado and Tara Murphy and Motoko Serino and Kirill Zhirkov and S. Shilling and Samantha R. Oates and James K. Leung and T. Parsotan and Amit K. Ror and Shashi B. Pandey and S. Iyyani and V. Sharma and A. Aryan and Jin-Ming Bai and Pavel Balanutsa and David Buckley and María D. Caballero-García and I. M. Carrasco-García and A. Castellón and Sebastián Castillo and Chen-Zhou Cui and Yu-Feng Fan and Emilio Fernández-García and Guillermo García-Segura and Maria Gritsevich and Sergiy Guziy and David Hiriart and William H. Lee and Soomin Jeong and Carlos Jesus Pérez del Pulgar and Ignacio Olivares and I. H. Park and Ignacio Pérez-García and S. Razzaque and Rubén Sánchez-Ramírez and Nataly Tyurina and Vladislav Topolev and Chuan-Jun Wang and Si-Yu Wu and Yu-Xin Xin and Ding-Rong Xiong and Xiao-Hong Zhao and Jirong Mao and Bao-Li Lun and Ye Kai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.18152},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

32 pages, 15 figures, 9 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ