2016/01/17 by Patrick Petitjean, F. Y. Wang, X. F. Wu +1 · 14 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmology #Galaxy #Gamma-ray burst #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Physical cosmology #Redshift #Reionization #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Star formation #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11214-016-0235-6
published in Space Science Reviews 202(1-4), 195-234 (Springer Science+Business Media) · 38 pages, 18 figures, Review based on ISSI workshop "Gamma-Ray Bursts: a Tool to Explore the Young Universe" (2015, Beijing, China), accepted for publication in Space Science Reviews
arxiv created 2016/01/17 · openalex publication_date 2016/02/08 · arxiv updated 2016/02/17 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are short and intense flashes at the cosmological distances, which are the most luminous explosions in the Universe. The high luminosities of GRBs make them detectable out to the edge of the visible universe. So, they are unique tools to probe the properties of high-redshift universe: including the cosmic expansion and dark energy, star formation rate, the reionization epoch and the metal evolution of the Universe. First, they can be used to constrain the history of cosmic acceleration and the evolution of dark energy in a redshift range hardly achievable by other cosmological probes. Second, long GRBs are believed to be formed by collapse of massive stars. So they can be used to derive the high-redshift star formation rate, which can not be probed by current observations. Moreover, the use of GRBs as cosmological tools could unveil the reionization history and metal evolution of the Universe, the intergalactic medium (IGM) properties and the nature of first stars in the early universe. But beyond that, the GRB high-energy photons can be applied to constrain Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) and to test Einstein's Equivalence Principle (EEP). In this paper, we review the progress on the GRB cosmology and fundamental physics probed by GRBs.