Suchergebnisse

We present here a survey of high-ionization absorption lines in the afterglow spectra of longduration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) obtained with the VLT/X-shooter spectrograph. Our main goal is to investigate the circumburst medium in the natal regions of GRBs. Our primary focus is on the Nλλ 1238, 1242 line transitions, but we also discuss other high-ionization lines such as OVI, CIV, and SiIV. We find no correlation between the column density of N and the neutral gas properties such as metallicity, H column density, and dust depletion; however, the relative velocity of N, typically a blueshift with respect to the neutral gas, is found to be correlated with the column density of H. This may be explained if the N gas is part of an H region hosting the GRB, where the region's expansion is confined by dense, neutral gas in the GRB's host galaxy. We find tentative evidence (at 2σ significance) that the X-ray derived column density, N, may be correlated with the column density of N, which would indicate that both measurements are sensitive to the column density of the gas located in the vicinity of the GRB. We investigate the scenario where N (and also O) is produced by recombination after the corresponding atoms have been stripped entirely of their electrons by the initial prompt emission, in contrast to previous models where highly ionized gas is produced by photoionization from the GRB afterglow.© 2018 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. ; We would like to thank the referee for a clear and thorough report, which greatly improved the presentation of the results in the paper. We also wish to thank K. Wiersema and P. Moller for enlightening discussions. KEH and PJ acknowledge support by a Project Grant (162948-051) from The Icelandic Research Fund. JK acknowledges financial support from the Danish Council for Independent Research (EU-FP7 under the Marie-Curie grant agreement no. 600207) with reference DFF-MOBILEX-5051-00115. JJ acknowledges support from NOVA and NWO-FAPESP grant for advanced instrumentation in astronomy. AG acknowledges the financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding no. P1-0031 and project grant no. J1-8136). AdUP, CCT, and ZC acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity under grant number AYA 2014-58381-P. AdUP and CCT acknowledge support from Ramon y Cajal fellowships (RyC-2012-09975 and RyC-2012-09984). AdUP acknowledges support from a grant from the BBVA foundation for researchers and cultural creators. ZC acknowledges support from the Juan de la Cierva Incorporacion fellowship IJCI-2014-21669 and from the Spanish research project AYA 2014-58381-P. RS-R acknowledges support from ASI (Italian Space Agency) through the contract no. 2015-046-R.0 and from European Union Horizon 2020 Programme under the AHEAD project (grant agreement no. 654215).

The binary neutron star merger event GW170817 was detected through both electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves. Its afterglow emission may have been produced by either a narrow relativistic jet or an isotropic outflow. High-spatial-resolution measurements of the source size and displacement can discriminate between these scenarios. We present very-long-baseline interferometry observations, performed 207.4 days after the merger by using a global network of 32 radio telescopes. The apparent source size is constrained to be smaller than 2.5 milli-arc seconds at the 90% confidence level. This excludes the isotropic outflow scenario, which would have produced a larger apparent size, indicating that GW170817 produced a structured relativistic jet. Our rate calculations show that at least 10% of neutron star mergers produce such a jet.© 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved. All rights reserved. ; The National Institute of Astrophysics is is acknowledged for PRIN-grant (2017) 1.05.01.88.06. The Italian Ministry for University and Research (MIUR) is acknowledged through the project >FIGARO> (Prin-MIUR) grant 1.05.06.13. ASI is acknowledged for grant I/004/11/3. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Commission Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement 730562 (RadioNet). The Spanish Ministerio de Economa y Competitividad (MINECO) is acknowledged for financial support under grants AYA201676012-C3-1-P, FPA2015-69210-C6-2-R, and MDM-2014-0369 of ICCUB (Unidad de Excelencia >Mara de Maeztu>). M.A.P.-T. acknowledges support from the Spanish MINECO through grants AYA2012-38491-C02-02 and AYA2015-63939-C2-1-P.T.A. is supported by the National Key R&D Programme of China (2018YFA0404603). E.C.-M. acknowledges support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 653477. S.F. thanks the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office (OTKA NN110333) for support. The Long Baseline Array is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility, which is funded by the Australian Government for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. ; Peer Reviewed