Prompt Optical Emission from Gamma-ray Bursts
Abstract
The Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) seeks to measure contemporaneous and early afterglow optical emission from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The ROTSE-I telescope array has been fully automated and responding to burst alerts from the GRB Coordinates Network since March 1998, taking prompt optical data for 30 bursts in its first year. We will briefly review observations of GRB990123 which revealed the first detection of an optical burst occurring during the gamma-ray emission, reaching 9th magnitude at its peak. In addition, we present here preliminary optical results for seven other gamma-ray bursts. No other optical counterparts were seen in this analysis, and the best limiting sensitivities are m(V) > 13.0 at 14.7 seconds after the gamma-ray rise, and m(V) > 16.4 at 62 minutes. These are the most stringent limits obtained for GRB optical counterpart brightness in the first hour after the burst. This analysis suggests that there is not a strong correlation between optical flux and gamma-ray emission.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9909219,
title = {Prompt Optical Emission from Gamma-ray Bursts},
author = {Robert Kehoe and Carl Akerlof and Richard Balsano and Scott Barthelmy and Jeff Bloch and Paul Butterworth and Don Casperson and Tom Cline and Sandra Fletcher and Fillippo Frontera and Galen Gisler and John Heise and Jack Hills and Kevin Hurley and Brian Lee and Stuart Marshall and Tim McKay and Andrew Pawl and Luigi Piro and Bill Priedhorsky and John Szymanski and Jim Wren},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9909219},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
to appear in the Proceedings of the 1999 May Symposium of the Space Telescope Institute. 20 pages, 13 figures