| Issue |
A&A
Volume 664, August 2022
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | A131 | |
| Number of page(s) | 24 | |
| Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202142835 | |
| Published online | 19 August 2022 | |
A proposed network of gamma-ray burst detectors on the global navigation satellite system Galileo G2★
1
Max-Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics,
Giessenbachstr. 1,
85748
Garching, Germany
e-mail: jcg@mpe.mpg.de
2
Technical University of Munich, Institute for Astronomical and Physical Geodesy,
Arcisstr. 21,
80333
Munich, Germany
3
Ioffe Institute,
Polytechnikheskaya 26,
St. Petersburg
194021,
Russia
Received:
5
December
2021
Accepted:
17
May
2022
The accurate localization of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remains a crucial task. Historically, improved localizations have led to the discovery of afterglow emission and the realization of their cosmological distribution via redshift measurements; however, a more recent requirement comes with the potential of studying the kilonovae of neutron star mergers. Gravitational wave detectors are expected to provide locations to not better than 10 square degrees over the next decade. With their increasing horizon for merger detections the intensity of the gamma-ray and kilonova emission also drops, making their identification in large error boxes a challenge. Thus, a localization via the gamma-ray emission seems to be the best chance to mitigate this problem. Here we propose to equip some of the second-generation Galileo satellites with dedicated GRB detectors. This saves costs for launches and satellites for a dedicated GRB network, the large orbital radius is beneficial for triangulation, and perfect positional and timing accuracy come for free. We present simulations of the triangulation accuracy, demonstrating that short GRBs as faint as GRB 170817A can be localized to 1 degree radius (1σ).
Key words: gamma-ray burst: general / gravitational waves / instrumentation: detectors / space vehicles: instruments
© J. Greiner et al. 2022
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe-to-Open model.
Open Access funding provided by Max Planck Society.
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