GRB051210: Swift detection of a short gamma ray burst
Abstract
The short/hard GRB051210 was detected and located by the Swift-BAT instrument and rapidly pointed towards by the narrow field instrumens. The XRT was able to observe a bright X-ray afterglow, one of the few ever observed for this class of bursts. We present the analysis of the prompt and afterglow emission of this event The BAT spectrum is a power-law with photon index 1.1 +/-0.3. The X-ray light curve decays with slope 2.58+/-0.11 and shows a small flare in the early phases. The spectrum can be described with a power law with photon index 1.54+/-0.16 and absorption (7.5 (-3.2, +4.3)*10^20 cm-2 We find that the X-ray emission is consistent with the hypothesis that we are observing the curvature effect of a GRB occurred in a low density medium, with no detectable afterglow. We estimate the density of the circumburst medium to be lower than 4*10^-3 cm^-3. We also discuss different hypothesis on the possible origin of the flare.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0602541,
title = {GRB051210: Swift detection of a short gamma ray burst},
author = {V. La Parola and V. Mangano and D. Fox and B. Zhang and H. A. Krimm and G. Cusumano and T. Mineo and D. Burrows and S. Barthelmy and S. Campana and M. Capalbi and G. Chincarini and N. Gehrels and P. Giommi and F. E. Marshall and P. Meszaros and A. Moretti and P. T. O'Brien and D. M. Palmer and M. Perri and P. Romano and G. Tagliaferri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0602541},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to A&A Letters