Related papers: Relativistic shock breakout from a stellar wind
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…
Relativistic flows resulting from sudden explosive events upscatter ambient interstellar photons of local radiation fields. For Lorentz factor $ > 100$ and dense optical - UV radiation fields the emergent signal is a typical gamma ray…
Many models of cosmological gamma-ray bursts involve the sudden release of $\sim 10^{51}$ erg which produce shells which expand at relativistic speeds (Lorentz $\Gamma$ factors of $10^{2-3}$). We investigate the kinematic limits on the…
(Abridged) We interpret gamma ray bursts as relativistic, electromagnetic explosions. Specifically, we propose that they are created when a rotating, relativistic, stellar-mass progenitor loses much of its rotational energy in the form of a…
Magnetic flares create hot relativistic shocks outside the light cylinder radius of a magnetised star. Radio emission produced in such a shock or at a radius smaller than the shock undergoes free-free absorption while passing through the…
Observations show that high-velocity jets stem from deeply embedded young stars, which may still be experiencing infall from their parent cloud cores. Yet theory predicts that, early in this buildup, any outgoing wind is trapped by incoming…
Growing observational evidence supports the proposition that gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are powered by relativistic jets from massive helium stars whose cores have collapsed to black holes and an accretion disk (collapsars). We model the…
The prompt emission of gamma-ray bursts probably comes from a highly relativistic wind which converts part of its kinetic energy into radiation via the formation of shocks within the wind itself. Such "internal shocks" can occur if the wind…
In a recent paper we have calculated the power density spectrum of Gamma-Ray Bursts arising from multiple shocks in a relativistic wind. The wind optical thickness is one of the factors to which the power spectrum is most sensitive,…
We present a simple analytic model for the structure of non-relativistic and relativistic radiation mediated shocks. At shock velocities \beta_s\equiv v_s/c\gtrsim 0.1, the shock transition region is far from thermal equilibrium, since the…
The 'event' that triggers a gamma ray burst cannot last for more than a few seconds. This is, however, long compared with the dynamical timescale of a compact stellar-mass object ($\sim 10^{-3}$ seconds). Energy is assumed to be released as…
Unsteady activity of gamma-ray burst sources leads to internal shocks in their emergent relativistic wind. We study the emission spectra from such shocks, assuming that they produce a power-law distribution of relativistic electrons and…
Gamma-ray bursts with long durations are widely thought to arise from the collapse of massive stars, where the wind environment is unavoidable. It is also believed that $\gamma$-ray bursts come from jets. Considering these two points in…
Optical and radio afterglows arising from the shocks by relativistic conical ejecta running into pre-burst massive stellar winds are revisited. Under the homogeneous thin-shell approximation and a realistic treatment for the lateral…
Multiwavelength radiation from relativistic particles accelerated at shocks in novae and other astrophysical sources carries a wealth of information about the outflow properties and the microphysical processes at work near the shocks. The…
We show that the excellent optical and gamma-ray data available for GRB 080319B rule out the internal shock model for the prompt emission. The data instead point to a model in which the observed radiation was produced close to the…
The phase-transition induced collapse of a neutron star to a more compact configuration (typically a ``strange'' star) and the subsequent core bounce is often invoked as a model for gamma-ray bursts. We present the results of numerical…
The early X-ray afterglow for a significant number of gamma-ray bursts detected by the Swift satellite is observed to have a phase of very slow flux decline with time ($F_\nu \propto t^{-\alpha}$ with $0.2 \lesssim \alpha \lesssim 0.8$) for…
Beamed gamma-ray burst (GRB) sources produce a bow shock in their gaseous environment. The emitted flux from this bow shock may dominate over the direct emission from the jet for lines of sight which are outside the angular radius of the…
While it is generally agreed that the emitting regions in Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) move ultra relativistically towards the observer, different estimates of the initial Lorentz factors, $\Gamma_0$, lead to different, at times conflicting…