2023/03/13 by Fausnaugh, Michael M., Jayaraman, Rahul, Vanderspek, Roland +13 · 1 citation
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.07319
We present the TESS light curve of GRB 230307A. We find two distinct components: a bright, prompt optical component at the time of the Fermi observation that peaked at TESS magnitude 14.49 (averaged over 200 seconds), followed by a gradual rise and fall over 0.5 days, likely associated with the afterglow, that peaked at 17.65 mag. The prompt component is observed in a single 200s Full Frame Image and was undetectable in the next TESS image (T\rm mag > 17.79). Assuming that the onset of the optical transient was coincident with the gamma-ray emission, the prompt emission lasted less than 73.6 seconds, which implies the true peak was actually brighter than T\rm mag = 13.40. We also fit parametric models to the afterglow to characterize its shape. The TESS light curve can be retrieved at https://tess.mit.edu/public/tesstransients/lightcurves/lcgrb230307Acleaned.txt.