Related papers: Shock Breakout from Stellar Envelopes: The relativ…
Most recent extragalactic models of gamma-ray bursts consider the expansion of a relativistic blast wave, emanating from a solar-mass type progenitor, into the surrounding interstellar medium as the site for their activity. The popular…
Gamma-ray bursts are generally considered to be the result of internal shocks generated in an inhomogeneous relativistic outflow that arises from a fireball. In such shocks, the Fermi acceleration of protons is naturally expected to be at…
Superflares on the solar type stars observed by \textit{Kepler} demonstrate the contrast in the optical continuum of the order 0.1--1 per cent. The mechanism of formation of this radiation is not firmly established. We consider a model…
In this Letter we use the unprecedented spatial resolution of the Chandra X-ray Observatory to carry out, for the first time, a measurement of the post-shock electron temperature and proper motion of a young SNR, specifically to address…
Modern transient surveys have begun discovering and following supernovae (SNe) shortly after first light---providing systematic measurements of the rise of Type II SNe. We explore how analytic models of early shock-cooling emission from…
Type IIn and related supernovae show evidence for an interaction with a dense circumstellar medium that produces most of the supernova luminosity. X-ray emission from shock heated gas is crucial for the energetics of the interaction and can…
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…
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…
Electron-positron pair production by collision of photons is investigated in view of application to pulsar physics. We compute the absorption rate of individual gamma-ray photons by an arbitrary anisotropic distribution of softer photons,…
The recent detection of gamma radiation from Mkn 501 at energies as high as 25 TeV suggests stringent upper bounds on the diffuse, far infrared, extragalactic radiation density. The production of electron-positron pairs through…
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…
We derive a simple approximate model describing the early, hours to days, UV/optical supernova emission, which is produced by the expansion of the outer <~0.01 solar mass part of the shock-heated envelope, and precedes the optical emission…
A model is proposed for gamma-ray bursts based upon a neutrino burst of about 10^52 ergs lasting a few seconds above a heated collapsing neutron star. This type of thermal neutrino burst is suggested by relativistic hydrodynamic studies of…
The shock breakout emission is the first light that emerges from a supernova. In the spherical case it is characterized by a brief UV flash. In an axisymmetric, non-spherical prolate explosion, the shock first breaches the surface along the…
We study the dynamics of relativistic electromagnetic explosions as a possible mechanism for the production of Gamma-Ray Bursts. We propose that a rotating relativistic stellar-mass progenitor loses much of its spin energy in the form of an…
A theoretical attempt to identify the physical process responsible for the afterglow emission of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) is presented, leading to the occurrence of thermal emission in the comoving frame of the shock wave giving rise to the…
We present the results of numerical simulations of stationary, spherically outflowing, pair winds, with total luminosities of L=10^{35}- 10^{42} ergs/s. These results have direct relevance to the emission from hot, bare, strange stars,…
We discuss the generic characteristics of stochastic particle acceleration by a fully developed turbulence spectrum and show that resonant interactions of particles with high speed waves dominate the acceleration process. To produce the…
(Abbreviated) Particle-in-cell simulations of relativistic, weakly magnetized collisionless shocks show that particles can gain energy by repeatedly crossing the shock front. This requires scattering off self-generated small length-scale…
Opacity effects in relativistic sources of high-energy gamma-rays, such as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) or Blazars, can probe the Lorentz factor of the outflow and the distance of the emission site from the source, and thus help constrain the…