2015/09/04 by Hui Sun, Bing Zhang, Zhuo Li · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Event (particle physics) #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Luminosity #Luminosity function #Power law #Redshift #Supernova #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0004-637x/812/1/33
35 pages, 12 figures, accepted to ApJ
arxiv created 2015/09/04 · openalex publication_date 2015/10/06 · arxiv updated 2015/10/14 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Several types of extragalactic high-energy transients have been discovered, which include high-luminosity and low-luminosity long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), short-duration GRBs, supernova shock breakouts (SBOs), and tidal disruption events (TDEs) without or with an associated relativistic jet. In this paper, we apply a unified method to systematically study the redshift-dependent event rate densities and the global luminosity functions (GLFs; ignoring redshift evolution) of these transients. We introduce some empirical formulae for the redshift-dependent event rate densities for different types of transients and derive the local specific event rate density, which also represents its GLF. Long GRBs (LGRBs) have a large enough sample to reveal features in the GLF, which is best charaterized as a triple power law (PL). All the other transients are consistent with having a single-power-law (SPL) LF. The total event rate density depends on the minimum luminosity, and we obtain the following values in units of Gpc −3 yr −1 : for high-luminosity LGRBs above 10 50 erg s −1 ; for low-luminosity LGRBs above 5 × 10 46 erg s −1 ; and above 10 50 erg s −1 for short GRBs with three different merger delay models (Gaussian, lognormal, and PL); above 10 44 erg s −1 for SBOs, for normal TDEs above 10 44 erg s −1 ; and above 10 48 erg s −1 for TDE jets as discovered by Swift . Intriguingly, the GLFs of different kinds of transients, which cover over 12 orders of magnitude, are consistent with an SPL with an index of −1.6.