1,255 research outputs found
What Powered the Optical Transient AT2017gfo Associated with GW170817?
The groundbreaking discovery of the optical transient AT2017gfo associated with GW170817 opens a unique opportunity to study the physics of double neutron star (NS) mergers. We argue that the standard interpretation of AT2017gfo as being powered by radioactive decay of r-process elements faces the challenge of simultaneously accounting for the peak luminosity and peak time of the event, as it is not easy to achieve the required high mass, and especially the low opacity of the ejecta required to fit the data. A plausible solution would be to invoke an additional energy source, which is probably provided by the merger product. We consider energy injection from two types of the merger products: (1) a post-merger black hole powered by fallback accretion; and (2) a long-lived NS remnant. The former case can only account for the early emission of AT2017gfo, with the late emission still powered by radioactive decay. In the latter case, both early- and late-emission components can be well interpreted as due to energy injection from a spinning-down NS, with the required mass and opacity of the ejecta components well consistent with known numerical simulation results. We suggest that there is a strong indication that the merger product of GW170817 is a long-lived (supramassive or even permanently stable), low magnetic field NS. The result provides a stringent constraint on the equations of state of NSs
Dark Fluxes from Accreting Black Holes and Direct Detections
We show that accreting black hole systems could be sources for keV light dark
matter flux through several different mechanisms. We discuss two types of
systems: coronal thermal plasmas around supermassive black holes in active
galactic nuclei (AGNs), and accretion disks of stellar-mass X-ray black hole
binaries (BHBs). We explore how these black hole systems may produce keV light
dark matter fluxes and find that in order to account for the XENON1T excess,
the dark fluxes from the observed AGNs and BHBs sources have to exceed the
Eddington limit. We also extend the black hole mass region to primordial black
holes (PBHs) and discuss the possibility of contributing to keV light dark flux
via superradiance or Hawking radiation of PBHs. Besides, black holes can be
good accelerators to accrete and boost heavy dark matter particles. If
considering collisions or dark electromagnetism, those particles could then
escape and reach the benchmark speed of 0.1c at the XENON1T detector.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure
A supra-massive magnetar central engine for short GRB 130603B
We show that the peculiar early optical and in particular X-ray afterglow
emission of the short duration burst GRB 130603B can be explained by continuous
energy injection into the blastwave from a supra-massive magnetar central
engine. The observed energetics and temporal/spectral properties of the late
infrared bump (i.e., the "kilonova") are also found consistent with emission
from the ejecta launched during an NS-NS merger and powered by a magnetar
central engine. The isotropic-equivalent kinetic energies of both the GRB
blastwave and the kilonova are about erg, consistent
with being powered by a near-isotropic magnetar wind. However, this relatively
small value demands that most of the initial rotational energy of the magnetar
is carried away by gravitational wave
radiation. Our results suggest that (i) the progenitor of GRB 130603B would be
a NS-NS binary system, whose merger product would be a supra-massive neutron
star that lasted for about seconds; (ii) the equation-of-state of
nuclear matter would be stiff enough to allow survival of a long-lived
supra-massive neutron star, so that it is promising to detect bright
electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave triggers without short GRB
associations in the upcoming Advanced LIGO/Virgo era.Comment: Five pages including 1 Figure, to appear in ApJ
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