Related papers: Gamma-Ray Bursts and Particle Astrophysics
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the Universe, and their origin as well as mechanism are the focus of intense research and debate. More than three decades since their serendipitous discovery, followed by several…
A review is presented of the fireball model of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and of the production in GRB fireballs of high energy protons and neutrinos. Constraints imposed on the model by recent afterglow observations, which support the…
Decades of improving data and extensive theoretical research have led to a popular model of gamma-ray bursts. According to this model, a catastrophic event in a stellar system results in the formation of a compact central engine, which…
A review on the spectral and temporal properties of gamma-ray bursts is given. Special attention is paid to the spectral evolution of their continuum emission and its connection to the time evolution of the intensity. Efforts on…
Gamma-ray bursts are known to display various features on top of their canonical behavior. In this short review, we will describe and discuss two of them: the ultra-long gamma-ray bursts, which are defined by an extreme duration of their…
We propose that repeated photoexcitation/ionization of high Z atoms of highly relativistic flows by star light in dense stellar regions followed by emission of decay/recombination photons, which are beamed and boosted to gamma ray energies…
I outline a unified model of high-energy astrophysics, in which the gamma background radiation, cluster "cooling flows", gamma-ray bursts, X-ray flashes and cosmic-ray electrons and nuclei of all energies -share a common origin. The…
We propose that the cosmological gamma ray bursts arise from the collapse of neutron stars to black holes triggered by collisions or mergers with main sequence stars. This scenario represents a cosmological history qualitatively different…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are bright flashes of gamma-rays coming from the cosmos. They occur roughly once per day, last typically 10s of seconds and are the most luminous events in the universe. More than three decades after their discovery,…
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), short and intense pulses of low energy gamma-rays, have fascinated astronomers and astrophysicists since their unexpected discovery in the late sixties. During the last decade, several space missions: BATSE (Burst…
There are about 2000 gamma ray burst (GRB) events known to us with data pouring in at the rate of one per day. While the afterglows of GRBs in radio, optical and X-ray bands are successfully explained by the fireball model, a significant…
The two leading contenders for the theory of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and their afterglows, the Fireball and Cannonball models, are compared and their predictions are confronted, within space limitations, with key GRB observations, including…
The hard X-ray and gamma-ray phenomenology of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can be explained by an external shock model where a single relativistic blast wave interacts with the surrounding medium. Besides reproducing the generic spectral…
To anyone who has read a scientific journal or even a newspaper in the last six months, it might appear that cosmic gamma-ray bursts hold no more mysteries: they are cosmological, and possibly the most powerful explosions in the Universe.…
We examine what we regard as key observational results on GRB 970228 and GRB 970508 and show that the accumulated evidence strongly suggests that gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are cosmological fireballs. We further show that the observations…
Being the most extreme explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) provide a unique laboratory to study various plasma physics phenomena. The complex lightcurve and broad-band, non-thermal spectra indicate a very complicated system…
The extragalactic gamma-ray sky is dominated by two classes of sources: Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) and radio loud active galactic nuclei whose jets are pointing at us (blazars). We believe that the radiation we receive from them originates…
The observation by the BATSE instrument on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory that gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are distributed isotropically around the Earth but nonuniformly in distance has led to the widespread conclusion that GRBs are most…
In this paper we model the emission from a relativistically expanding electron-positron pair plasma fireball originating near the surface of a heated neutron star. This pair fireball is deposited via the annihilation of neutrino pairs…
In the standard fireball model of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the fireball starts with an optically thick phase. As it expands, the fireball becomes optically thin at some stage. The thermal radiation trapped in the originally opaque fireball…