A luminous blue kilonova and an off-axis jet from a compact binary merger at z=0.1341 [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.10624


The recent discovery of a faint gamma-ray burst (GRB) coincident with the gravitational wave (GW) event GW 170817 revealed the existence of a population of low-luminosity short duration gamma-ray transients produced by neutron star mergers in the nearby Universe. These events could be routinely detected by existing gamma-ray monitors, yet previous observations failed to identify them without the aid of GW triggers. Here we show that GRB150101B was an analogue of GRB170817A located at a cosmological distance. GRB 150101B was a faint short duration GRB characterized by a bright optical counterpart and a long-lived X-ray afterglow. These properties are unusual for standard short GRBs and are instead consistent with an explosion viewed off-axis: the optical light is produced by a luminous kilonova component, while the observed X-rays trace the GRB afterglow viewed at an angle of ~13 degrees. Our findings suggest that these properties could be common among future electromagnetic counterparts of GW sources.

Read this paper on arXiv…

E. Troja, G. Ryan, L. Piro, et. al.
Fri, 29 Jun 18
44/58

Comments: 21 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables