2018/01/31 by Paz Beniamini, Dimitrios Giannios, George Younes +4 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Afterglow #Astronomy #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Compton scattering #Ejecta #Gamma-ray burst #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Gravitational wave #Jet (fluid) #Neutron star #Optics #Photon #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Supernova #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/sty616
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 476(4), 5621-5628 (Oxford University Press) · 9 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
openalex publication_date 2018/03/06 · arxiv created 2018/05/07 · arxiv updated 2018/05/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The recent discovery of gravitational waves from GW170817, associated with a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) at a distance of 40 Mpc, has demonstrated that short GRBs can occur locally and at a reasonable rate. Furthermore, gravitational waves enable us to detect close-by GRBs, even when we are observing at latitudes far from the jet's axis. We consider here Compton echoes, the scattered light from the prompt and afterglow emission. Compton echoes, an as yet undetected counterpart of GRBs, peak in X-rays and maintain a roughly constant flux for hundreds to thousands of years after the burst. Though too faint to be detected in typical cosmological GRBs, a fraction of close-by bursts with a sufficiently large energy output in X-rays, and for which the surrounding medium is sufficiently dense, may indeed be observed in this way. The detection of a Compton echo could provide unique insight into the burst properties and the environment's density structure. In particular, it could potentially determine whether or not there was a successful jet that broke through the compact binary merger ejecta. We discuss here the properties and expectations from Compton echoes and suggest methods for detectability.