Related papers: Fallback Accretion Model for the Years-to-Decades …
GW170817 was the first detection of a binary neutron star merger via gravitational waves. The event was observed over a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, revealing a thermal kilonova dominating the optical signal during the first…
X-ray reverberation is a powerful technique which maps out the structure of the inner regions of accretion disks around black holes using the echoes of the coronal emission reflected by the disk. While the theory of X-ray reverberation has…
In addition to producing a strong gravitational signal, a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), and a compact remnant, neutron star mergers eject significant masses at significant kinetic energies. This mass ejection takes place via dynamical mass…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect gravitational wave signals from coalescing pairs of massive black holes in the total mass range (10^5 - 10^7)/Msol out to cosmological distances. Identifying and monitoring the…
Compact binary mergers, with neutron stars or neutron star and black-hole components, are thought to produce various electromagnetic counterparts: short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) from ultra-relativistic jets followed by broadband afterglow;…
We present radio, optical/NIR, and X-ray observations of the afterglow of the short-duration 130603B, and uncover a break in the radio and optical bands at 0.5 d after the burst, best explained as a jet break with an inferred jet opening…
The accretion/ejection coupling in accreting black hole binaries has been described by empirical relations between the X-ray/radio and X-ray/optical-infrared luminosities. These correlations were initially thought to be universal. However,…
We report on optical, near-infrared and centimeter radio observations of GRB000418 which allow us to follow the evolution of the afterglow from 2 to 200 days after the gamma-ray burst. In modeling these broad-band data, we find that an…
The electromagnetic emission and the afterglow observations of the binary neutron star merger event GW 170817A confirmed the association of the merger with a short gamma-ray burst (sGRB) harboring a narrow ($5${\deg}-$10${\deg}) and…
Models for superbursts from neutron stars involving carbon shell flashes predict that the mass accretion rate should be anywhere in excess of one tenth of the Eddington limit. Yet, superbursts have so far only been detected in systems for…
We present a revised and complete optical afterglow light curve of the binary neutron star merger GW170817, enabled by deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) F606W observations at $\approx\!584$ days post-merger, which provide a robust optical…
GRB 080503 is a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected by \emph{Swift} and has been classified as a compact-star-merger-origin GRB. The soft extended emission and the simultaneous late re-brightening in both the X-ray and optical afterglow…
We present three-dimensional radiative transfer calculations for the ejecta from a neutron star merger that include line-by-line opacities for tens of millions of bound-bound transitions, composition from an r-process nuclear network, and…
Due to observational challenges our knowledge of low-level accretion flows around neutron stars is limited. We present Nustar, Swift and Chandra observations of the low-mass X-ray binary IGR J17062-6143, which has been persistently…
The optical light curve of the energetic gamma-ray burst GRB 991216 is consistent with jet-like behavior in which a power-law decay steepens from t**(-1.22 +/- 0.04) at early times to t**(-1.53 +/- 0.05) in a gradual transition at around 2…
Swift discovered XRF 050416A with the BAT and began observing it with its narrow field instruments only 64.5 s after the burst onset. Its very soft spectrum classifies this event as an X-ray flash. The afterglow X-ray emission was monitored…
Fallback in core-collapse supernova explosions is potentially of significant importance for the birth spins of neutron stars and black holes. It has recently been pointed out that the angular momentum imparted onto a compact remnant by…
Radio imaging of the microquasar GRS 1915+105 with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) during various flaring, quiescent, or oscillatory states of the black hole binary, always resolves the nucleus as a compact jet of length about…
Depending upon the properties of their compact remnants and the physics included in the models, simulations of neutron star mergers can produce a broad range of ejecta properties. The characteristics of this ejecta, in turn, define the…
We perform two-dimensional, multi-group radiation hydrodynamic simulations to explore the observational properties of a solar-like star colliding with an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole at separation of $\sim 100$…