Issue |
A&A
Volume 510, February 2010
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | L7 | |
Number of page(s) | 4 | |
Section | Letters | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/200913980 | |
Published online | 18 February 2010 |
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
The onset of the GeV afterglow of GRB 090510
G. Ghirlanda1 - G. Ghisellini1 - L. Nava2
1 - INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera,
via E. Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate, Italy
2 -
SISSA-ISAS, via Beirut 2-4, 34151 Trieste, Italy
Received 29 December 2009 / Accepted 21 January 2010
Abstract
We study the emission of the short/hard Gamma Ray Burst 090510 at energies >0.1 GeV
as observed by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard the Fermi satellite.
The GeV flux rises in time as t2 up till 0.2 s after the peak of the MeV pulse detected
by the Fermi Gamma Burst Monitor (GBM) after which it
decays as t-1.5 up to 200 s.
Its energy spectrum is consistent with
.
The time behavior and the spectrum of the high energy LAT flux
are strong evidences of an afterglow origin.
We then interpret it as synchrotron radiation produced by the forward shock
of a fireball with a bulk Lorentz factor
.
The afterglow peak time is independent of energy in the 0.1-30 GeV range
and coincides with the arrival time of the highest energy photon (
30 GeV).
Since the flux detected by the GBM and the LAT have
different origins, the delay between these two components
is not entirely due to possible violation of the Lorentz invariance.
The LAT component alone allows us to set a reliable lower limit
on the quantum-gravity mass of 4.7 times the Planck mass.
Key words: gamma-ray burst: general - radiation mechanisms: non-thermal - X-rays: general
1 Introduction
The EGRET instrument onboard the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) detected in few gamma ray bursts an emission above 100 MeV (Fishman & Meegan 1995; Kaneko et al. 2008). Since 2008 the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi telescope with its much better sensitivity (and reduced dead time) has detected 12 GRBs in the 100 MeV to few GeV energy range. These bursts can shed light for the first time on the origin of the GeV emission and will help to answer some of the open questions of which, the most compelling one is probably that about its origin, i.e. does the GeV emission belong to the prompt phase, or is it afterglow emission produced by the fireball colliding with the circum-burst medium? Or does it have yet another origin?
GRB 090510 is a short/hard burst at redshift
(Rau et al. 2009)
detected by Fermi (Guiriec et al. 2009), AGILE (Longo et al. 2009), Swift (Hoversten et al. 2009),
Konus-Wind (Golenetskii et al. 2009) and Suzaku (Ohmori et al. 2009).
The Fermi-Gamma Burst Monitor (GBM) triggered on a precursor while
the main emission episode in the 8 keV-40 MeV energy range
started 0.5 s after trigger and lasted up to
1 s.
The emission observed by the Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) started 0.65 s after the trigger
and lasted
200 s.
The joint GBM-LAT spectral analysis showed
the presence of two components.
Fermi-LAT detected a
GeV photon delayed by 0.829 s with respect
to the trigger (Abdo et al. 2009a - A09 hereafter).
The precursor was not seen by AGILE, which triggered on the main emission episode. The flux detected by the Mini Calorimeter (MCAL, 0.3-10 MeV) lasted 0.2 s. As it ended, the Gamma Ray Imaging Detector (GRID, 0.03-30 GeV) started to detect a high energy component lasting for 10 s and decaying as t-1.3 (Giuliani et al. 2009).
![]() |
Figure 1: Fermi-LAT light curve of the emission of GRB 090510 above 100 MeV. The times were scaled to the time T*=0.6 s after the GBM trigger. This is the time corresponding to the main pulse of emission detected by the GBM in the 8 keV-10 MeV energy range (see A09). The solid line is the best fit to the data points obtained with a smoothly broken power-law plus a constant (dashed lines). The inset shows the AGILE light curve (photons energies between 30 and 300 MeV). The curve is the best fit of the Fermi data scaled to the AGILE data points. |
Open with DEXTER |
The distinguishing property of GRB 090510 arising from the Fermi and AGILE data
is that the MeV emission component, commonly detected in GRBs, was followed
by a much longer lasting high energy emission detected above 100 MeV.
Both the AGILE and Fermi spectra suggested that this component is not
the extrapolation of the soft
MeV spectrum to the GeV range.
A09 interpreted the
MeV flux as synchrotron radiation and the
LAT flux as its synchrotron self-Compton emission.
The detection by Fermi of a 30 GeV photon allowed us to set a lower limit on the bulk Lorentz
factor of the fireball
,
based on the compactness argument (A09). The 30 GeV photon arrived
0.829 s after the trigger (set by the precursor)
and 0.3 s after the beginning of the GBM main pulse. A09
interpreted the flux detected by the LAT as due to the self-Compton
scatterings of the lower frequencies synchrotron photons detected by
the GBM. In this framework, the GBM and LAT detected photons are
produced in the same region. Their emission time can then be the same.
If true, this allows us to interpret the delayed arrival time of the
31 GeV photon as due to Lorentz invariance violation. This, in
fact, introduces an energy dependent photon speed.
A09 themselves, however, consider also other hypotheses (i.e. different
delay times) and derive several lower limits on the quantum-gravity
mass scale.
Recent works on the high energy emission of LAT-detected GRBs include Kumar & Barniol Duran (2009a,b), discussing GRB 080916C (Abdo et al. 2009b). For this burst they also proposed that the LAT-detected flux can be synchrotron produced in the external shock (as suggested by Gao et al. 2009; Corsi et al. 2009a,b; and De Pasquale et al. 2009 for GRB 090510; but see also Fan et al. 2008; Zou et al. 2009; Zhang & Peer 2009, for an inverse Compton origin). Hadronic models have been proposed to explain the emission properties of GRB 080916C (Razzaque et al. 2009; Asano et al. 2009) and a possible interpretation in the context of the cannonball model (Dado & Dar 2009) has also been considered. A more extensive study of the light curve decay of the bursts detected by Fermi-LAT and on its possible interpretation in the context of the external shock produced by a radiative decelerating fireball is presented in Ghisellini et al. (2009).
If
,
the fireball should start to decelerate and produce
a luminous afterglow rather early (e.g. Piran 2005), even at the sub-second timescale.
We present by analyzing the Fermi-LAT light-curve and spectra of GRB 090510
we present strong evidences that the flux detected by the LAT
is afterglow emission of the forward external shock.
In this framework we derive the initial
of the fireball. According to our interpretation,
the GBM and the LAT detected fluxes are produced in different regions and at different
emission times. Therefore, the LAT emission by itself is the best tool to constrain the arrival
time delay of photons of different (high) energies and derive a more reliable lower limit on the
Lorentz invariance violation.
2 Fermi-LAT data analysis
We analyzed the Fermi-LAT data of GRB 090510 with the Fermi
ScienceTools (v9r15p2) released on Aug. 8th 2008.
Photons were selected (with the gtselect tool) around
and
.
Different energy bins were considered for the analysis of the LAT light
curve, but only photons with energy >100 MeV were extracted.
Light curves and spectra were created with the gtbin tool.
The spectral response files were created with the gtrspgen.
The spectra were analyzed with Xspec(v.12).
3 Results
Figure 1 shows the light curve considering all LAT photons with energies >100 MeV.
The times are scaled to T*=0.6
s, which corresponds to the time of the first main pulse observed by
the GBM. We fit the light curve with the sum of two components, i.e. a
smoothly broken power law and a constant to account for the flattening
of the flux visible after 200 s, corresponding to the the
time when the source flux becomes consistent with the background level
(as also shown in De Pasquale et al. 2009):
When









![]() |
Figure 2:
Fermi-LAT light curve of GRB 090510 between 0.1 and 1 GeV
and above 1 GeV ( top and middle panels, respectively) in the first 10 s.
The times are scaled to T*=0.6 s (see text).
The solid line is the fit of the light curve >0.1 GeV (Fig. 1).
The bottom panel shows the photon spectral index (1 |
Open with DEXTER |
The emission above 100 MeV peaks at
T-T*=0.22 s (i.e. 0.82 s after the GBM trigger).
The time of the peak coincides with the arrival time
of the highest energy photon of 30 GeV.
Figure 1 shows that the LAT flux lasts for about 200 s
(and it sets to the background level afterwards).
Instead, the emission detected
by the GBM in the 8 keV-10 MeV energy range ceases after 1 s (A09).
![]() |
Figure 3: Fermi-LAT light curve of GRB 090510 in four energy channels ( from top to bottom): 0.1-0.2 GeV, 0.2-0.4 GeV, 0.4-0.8 GeV, >0.8 GeV. The curves are the best fit obtained from the LAT light curve (>0.1 GeV - Fig. 1) rescaled to the single channel light curves. |
Open with DEXTER |
Figure 2 shows the LAT light curve in the first 10 s separated into two energy bands, i.e. 0.1-1 GeV and >1 GeV (top and middle panels, respectively). The curves correspond to the same best fit obtained from the >0.1 GeV light curve (Fig. 1), only re-normalized to the data points. We further separated the light curve into four broad energy channels: 0.1-0.2 GeV, 0.2-0.4 GeV, 0.4-0.8 GeV and >0.8 GeV (Fig. 3). Figures 2 and 3 show that the time of the peak is the same in different energy ranges.
We also analyzed the spectra of the early GeV emission component.
We considered the spectrum integrated in time between
T-T*=0.1 and 7 s,
and we also extracted three time resolved spectra distributed in this time interval.
The photon spectral index of the fit with a single power
law of the average spectrum (hatched region) and of the time resolved
spectra (filled squares) are shown in the bottom panel of Fig. 2.
The spectrum before the peak is hard with a photon index
and then
softens to
.
The three time resolved spectra are consistent with the
time-integrated spectrum.
4 Estimate of the initial bulk Lorentz factor
The derived peak time of the LAT received flux translates
into an estimate of the bulk Lorentz factor
at the start
of the afterglow.
The peak time of the afterglow bolometric luminosity occurs at a
time of the order of the deceleration time.
If the circumburst number density n is homogeneous we have (e.g. Sari & Piran 1999)
where









4.1 A synchrotron origin of the LAT emission
Following standard arguments, the minimum electron energy
of the injected electrons in the forward shock is
,
while the magnetic field value is
.
Electrons with
emit an observed synchrotron frequency
MeV.
This frequency is below the LAT energy range, but the injection of a
power law
distribution of electrons extending to
ensures that the LAT flux can indeed have a synchrotron origin.
The synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) spectrum extends to much higher
frequencies (e.g. Fan et al. 2008; Corsi et al. 2009a,b),
but becomes important only above
,
i.e. above the TeV energy range.
Note the strong dependence of
and
on the bulk
Lorentz factor:
a synchrotron origin of a
GeV afterglow is reasonable only for
rather large
,
while the SSC flux becomes more important for smaller
.
This has a simple and important consequence. Bursts with
or smaller can produce high energy afterglow radiation through the SSC mechanism,
but the onset time of their afterglows will be large, in turn implying for the same
emitted energy a lower luminosity (see also Kumar & Barniol Duran 2009a).
They are then more difficult to detect. The best candidates for a LAT detection
are therefore bursts with large
,
because this ensures an early onset
of the afterglow, implying large luminosities.
5 Test of the Lorentz-invariance violation
The arrival time of the 30 GeV photon coincides with the peak of the afterglow emission. This is reasonable, because this is the time when we have the maximum probability to detect it (maximum flux and hard spectrum). If we assume that the 30 GeV photon was indeed produced at the peak time, then the maximum possible time delay it can have is of the order of the width of the time bin of the peak (0.15 s). More conservatively, we can assume that the 30 GeV photon was produced right at the beginning of the afterglow, and it arrives delayed by 0.22 s due to violation of the Lorentz invariance.
The time delay
between the arrival time of a low and a high energy photon
for a linear dependence of the photon's propagation speed on its energy is
![]() |
(3) |
where


For a delay of 0.15 s we derive
,
while the more
conservative limit (delay of 0.217 s) is
(we used
).
These limits are consistent with those of A09, but exclude their lowest estimates.
6 Conclusions
The detection of an early high energy emission in the GeV range
inevitably implies a large bulk Lorentz factor :
to avoid
suppression of the GeV emission due to the
process
if the high energy photons belong to the prompt phase, or to have
an early peak flux time if the emission belongs to the afterglow phase.
We have shown that the latter case is indeed favored (see also Gao et al. 2009),
because we see the peak time of the emission in the LAT light-curve
(as also seen in other GRBs in the infrared-optical band, e.g.
Molinari et al. 2007 for GRB 060418 and GRB 060607A).
Furthermore, also the energy spectral index
is very similar to what we see in the afterglow phase.
A large
,
implying an early onset of the afterglow, means a large
luminosity at the peak time (for equal emitted energy), and high
typical frequencies. This makes synchrotron the most likely process for the
LAT emission we see.
GRBs with smaller
will have their prompt emission less blue-shifted,
and it would be more difficult for them to reach the LAT energy range
during their prompt phase.
Their afterglows can achieve this, through the SSC process,
but their afterglow peak time is longer, and so their fluxes are fainter
(as
if they emit
the same amount of energy at the peak, see Eq. (2)).
A large
,
instead, means a large blue-shift for the photons of the prompt,
an early onset of the afterglow, implying more flux at the peak, and finally
higher intrinsic afterglow frequencies, allowing even the synchrotron
photons of the afterglow to reach the LAT energy range.
Therefore GRBs with large
should be much more luminous in the
LAT energy range than the other GRBs (as suggested also by Kumar & Barniol Duran 2009a).
The limits derived here on the quantum gravity mass scale are not very different from those derived by A09, but we could associate the GBM and the LAT fluxes to two different components. We can then argue that the high energy photons are generated at (slightly) later times than the photons detected by the GBM, and the delay of their arrival times is not entirely due to quantum gravity effects. Instead, since photons above 100 MeV belong to the same component, they are the best tool to investigate quantum gravity effects.
This suggests a recipe for a robust test on the Lorentz invariance violation, possible with very bright and short bursts detected at high energies. A short duration of the prompt ensures that the fireball has a relatively narrow width, and in turn this should correspond to a well-defined afterglow peak. A bright flux ensures good photon statistics, enabling us to measure more accurately possible delays as a function of photon energies.
AcknowledgementsWe thank the referee P. Kumar for his useful comments. This research was supported by PRIN-INAF 2007 and ASI I/088/06/ grants. G. Ghirlanda acknowledges the NORDITA program on Physics of relativistic flows. We thank F. Tavecchio and Y. Poutanen for helpful discussions.
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All Figures
![]() |
Figure 1: Fermi-LAT light curve of the emission of GRB 090510 above 100 MeV. The times were scaled to the time T*=0.6 s after the GBM trigger. This is the time corresponding to the main pulse of emission detected by the GBM in the 8 keV-10 MeV energy range (see A09). The solid line is the best fit to the data points obtained with a smoothly broken power-law plus a constant (dashed lines). The inset shows the AGILE light curve (photons energies between 30 and 300 MeV). The curve is the best fit of the Fermi data scaled to the AGILE data points. |
Open with DEXTER | |
In the text |
![]() |
Figure 2:
Fermi-LAT light curve of GRB 090510 between 0.1 and 1 GeV
and above 1 GeV ( top and middle panels, respectively) in the first 10 s.
The times are scaled to T*=0.6 s (see text).
The solid line is the fit of the light curve >0.1 GeV (Fig. 1).
The bottom panel shows the photon spectral index (1 |
Open with DEXTER | |
In the text |
![]() |
Figure 3: Fermi-LAT light curve of GRB 090510 in four energy channels ( from top to bottom): 0.1-0.2 GeV, 0.2-0.4 GeV, 0.4-0.8 GeV, >0.8 GeV. The curves are the best fit obtained from the LAT light curve (>0.1 GeV - Fig. 1) rescaled to the single channel light curves. |
Open with DEXTER | |
In the text |
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