Related papers: Interaction of GRB Fireballs with Ambient Medium
Standard GRB fireballs must carry free neutrons. This crucially changes the mechanism of fireball deceleration by an external medium. As the ion fireball decelerates, the coasting neutrons form a leading front. They gradually decay, leaving…
Fireballs of gamma-ray bursts are partially made of free neutrons. Their presence crucially changes the mechanism of the fireball deceleration by an external medium. At late stages of the explosion, neutrons fully decouple from ions and…
Physics of GRB blast waves is discussed with a focus on two effects: (1) pair creation in the external medium by the gamma-ray front and (2) decay of neutrons ahead of the decelerating blast wave. Both effects impact the afterglow mechanism…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are emitted by relativistic ejecta from powerful cosmic explosions. Their light curves suggest that the gamma-ray emission occurs at early stages of the ejecta expansion, well before it decelerates in the ambient…
About 15% of Gamma Ray Bursts have precursors, i.e. emission episodes preceding the main event, whose spectral and temporal properties are similar to the main emission. We propose that precursors have their own fireball, producing afterglow…
The interaction of a relativistic fireball with its ambient medium is described through two shocks: a reverse shock that propagates into the fireball, and a forward shock that propagates into the medium. The observed optical flash of GRB…
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…
The standard afterglow model neglects the presence of the GRB prompt radiation ahead of the blast wave. In fact, the blast wave is dramatically influenced by the leading gamma-ray front which preaccelerates the ambient medium and loads it…
Recent observations suggest that long-duration gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows are produced by highly relativistic jets emitted in core-collapse explosions. As the jet makes its way out of the stellar mantle, a bow shock runs ahead…
The detection of x-ray afterglows of gamma-ray burst (GRB) sources has enabled the optical discovery that GRBs are at cosmological distances, which confirms that the enormous luminosities required must produce a relativistically expanding…
The afterglow of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) is commonly thought to be due to continuous deceleration of a relativistically expanding fireball in the surrounding medium. Assuming that the expansion of the fireball is adiabatic and that the…
It is proposed that the baryons in gamma ray burst (GRB) fireballs originate as "pick-up" neutrons that leak in sideways from surrounding baryonic matter and convert to protons in a collision avalanche. The asymptotic Lorentz factor is…
The fireball, the promising model of the gamma-ray burst (GRB), is an opaque radiation plasma, whose energy is significantly greater than its rest mass. We numerically simulate the evolution of the fireball heated by the…
We study three processes that shape the nuclear composition of GRB fireballs: (1) neutronization in the central engine, (2) nucleosynthesis in the fireball as it expands and cools, and (3) spallation of nuclei in subsequent internal shocks.…
Currently popular models for progenitors of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the mergers of compact objects and the explosions of massive stars. These two cases have distinctive environments for GRBs: compact object mergers occur in the…
Fireballs are huge isotropic explosions models widely believed to explain Gamma Ray Burst, GRBs (Piran,1999); ever-new versions consider wide beamed (10^o) Jet explosions hitting external shells. On the contrary, since 1994-1998, we argued…
Fireballs with high energy per baryon rest mass (> 400) contain a relatively slow neutron component. We show here that in this situation the thermal history of fireballs is very different from the standard adiabatic cooling.
Observations of the afterglows of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have revealed that they lie at cosmological distances, and so correspond to the release of an enormous amount of energy. The nature of the central engine that powers these events and…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are newly discovered radio transient sources. Their high dispersion measures indicate an extragalactic origin. But due to the lack of observational data in other wavelengths, their progenitors still remain unclear.…
Gamma ray burst (GRB) fireballs provide one of very few astrophysical environments where one can contemplate the acceleration of cosmic rays to energies that exceed 10^20 eV. The assumption that GRBs are the sources of the observed cosmic…