2004/07/20 by K. S. Cheng, Tiberiu Harko, T. Harko
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2004.07.004
published as Astropart.Phys. 22 (2004) 297-305 · 7 pages, no figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle Physics
arxiv created 2004/07/20 · openalex publication_date 2004/08/18 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The discovery of X-ray afterglows of GRBs, and the identification of host galaxies of GRBs, confirm the cosmological origin of GRBs. However, the discovery of the delayed MeV-GeV photons in GRB940217 imposes serious challenges for the standard emission model of GRB. Although the delayed MeV-GeV photons might be explained by some radiation emission mechanisms, the mystery of detecting an 18 GeV photon still remains unsolved. We suggest that the detection of the 18-GeV photon ∼ 4500 s after the keV/MeV burst in GRB 940217 provides a strong evidence for the existence of extra-dimensions and/or quantum gravity effects. The delay scale of the 18-GeV photon leads to an estimation of the fundamental energy scale, associated with the linear energy dependence of the speed of light, of the order of 2.1× 1015 GeV, which is consistent with the results obtained by another independent analysis on the data of OSSE and BATSE.