6,875 research outputs found
Early Afterglows of Gamma-Ray Bursts in a Stratified Medium with a Power-Law Density Distribution
A long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) has been widely thought to arise from
the collapse of a massive star, and it has been suggested that its ambient
medium is a homogenous interstellar medium (ISM) or a stellar wind. There are
two shocks when an ultra-relativistic fireball that has been ejected during the
prompt gamma-ray emission phase sweeps up the circumburst medium: a reverse
shock that propagates into the fireball, and a forward shock that propagates
into the ambient medium. In this paper, we investigate the temporal evolution
of the dynamics and emission of these two shocks in an environment with a
general density distribution of (where is the radius) by
considering thick-shell and thin-shell cases. A GRB afterglow with one smooth
onset peak at early times is understood to result from such external shocks.
Thus, we can determine the medium density distribution by fitting the onset
peak appearing in the light curve of an early optical afterglow. We apply our
model to 19 GRBs, and find that their values are in the range of 0.4 - 1.4,
with a typical value of , implying that this environment is neither a
homogenous interstellar medium with nor a typical stellar wind with
. This shows that the progenitors of these GRBs might have undergone a new
mass-loss evolution.Comment: 32 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, published in Ap
Possible High-Energy Neutrino and Photon Signals from Gravitational Wave Bursts due to Double Neutron Star Mergers
As the technology of gravitational-wave and neutrino detectors becomes
increasingly mature, a multi-messenger era of astronomy is ushered in. Advanced
gravitational wave detectors are close to making a ground-breaking discovery of
gravitational wave bursts (GWBs) associated with mergers of double neutron
stars (NS-NS). It is essential to study the possible electromagnetic (EM) and
neutrino emission counterparts of these GWBs. Recent observations and numerical
simulations suggest that at least a fraction of NS-NS mergers may leave behind
a massive millisecond magnetar as the merger product. Here we show that protons
accelerated in the forward shock powered by a magnetar wind pushing the ejecta
launched during the merger process would interact with photons generated in the
dissipating magnetar wind and emit high energy neutrinos and photons. We
estimate the typical energy and fluence of the neutrinos from such a scenario.
We find that PeV neutrinos could be emitted from the shock front as long
as the ejecta could be accelerated to a relativistic speed. The diffuse
neutrino flux from these events, even under the most optimistic scenarios, is
too low to account for the two events announced by the IceCube Collaboration,
but it is only slightly lower than the diffuse flux of GRBs, making it an
important candidate for the diffuse background of PeV neutrinos. The
neutron-pion decay of these events make them a moderate contributor to the
sub-TeV gamma-ray diffuse background.Comment: Accepted for publication in PRD, minor revisio
Development and construction of China
Libraries in China's higher education institutions have been developing in keeping pace with the flourishing development of China's higher education. This article aims to make an introduction to the construction of China's higher education libraries, especially the recent three decades' achievements since China's reform and opening-up in 1978. In this article, the authors draw a general picture of the development of libraries in China's higher education institutions, covering such eight aspects as management, types and positioning, organizational structure and personnel, expenditure and buildings, reader service, building and sharing of resources as well as automation system.</p
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