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Exceptionally bright optical emission from a rare and distant gamma-ray burst

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 843–855 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Long gamma-ray bursts are produced by energy dissipation within ultra-relativistic jets launched by newborn black holes after the collapse of a peculiar class of massive stars. Right after the luminous and highly variable gamma-ray emission, a multi-wavelength afterglow is released by external dissipation of the jet energy in the medium that surrounds the progenitor star. We report the discovery of a very bright (~10 mag) optical emission ~28 s after the explosion of the extremely luminous and energetic GRB 210619B located at redshift 1.937. We observed the transition from a bright reverse to the forward shock emission, demonstrating that the early and late gamma-ray-burst multi-wavelength emission originated from a narrow, magnetized jet propagating into a rarefied interstellar medium. These conditions are found to be optimal to produce the bright optical flash from the reverse shock. Slower jets propagating in denser media are expected to cause a flash of very-high-energy radiation, which is yet to be discovered.

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Fig. 1: Temporal behaviour of the multi-wavelength emission from GRB 210619B and the joint time-resolved spectra.
Fig. 2: Empirical model of the multi-wavelength afterglow emission of GRB 210619B.
Fig. 3: Optical light curves of GRBs with possible bright reverse shock emission components.
Fig. 4: Multi-wavelength flux and spectral index evolution and comparison with the model.
Fig. 5: Selected spectral energy distributions.
Fig. 6: Eiso–Γ plane and the region where the optical flash from a relativistic reverse shock can be produced.

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Data availability

Swift/XRT raw data are public and available from the UK Swift Science Data Centre at the University of Leicester. The light curve data are available at: https://www.swift.ac.uk/xrt_curves/GRB_ID/flux.qdp where GRB_ID is the GRB observation ID. The spectra were obtained at: https://www.swift.ac.uk/xrt_spectra/addspec.php?targ=GRB_ID. The details of the automatic spectral analysis are available at: https://www.swift.ac.uk/xrt_spectra/docs.php. Fermi/LAT raw data are public and can be downloaded using GTBURST software at: https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/data/analysis/scitools/gtburst.html. Fermi/LAT 2nd GRB catalogue data are available at: https://www-glast.stanford.edu/pub_data/953/. All reduced data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

HEASoft, Xspec and PyXspec are freely available at: https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/heasoft, https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/xanadu/xspec and https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/xanadu/xspec/python/html/index.html. Gtburst is one of the Fermi Science Tools packages, freely available at: https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/data/analysis/software/. The details of the gtburst analysis can be found at: https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/data/analysis/scitools/gtburst.html. The emcee Python package is available at: https://emcee.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/install/. All computer code is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

S.K. and M.P. acknowledge support from the European Structural and Investment Fund and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (Project CoGraDS– CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000437). FRAM-ORM operation is supported by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (project numbers LM2015046, LM2018105 and LTT17006) and by the European Structural and Investment Fund and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (project numbers CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_013/0001403 and CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/18_046/0016007). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under the AHEAD2020 project (grant agreement number 871158). B.B. and M.B. acknowledge financial support from MIUR (PRIN 2017 grant number 20179ZF5KS). This research was supported under the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation grant number 075-15-2022-262 (13.MNPMU.21.0003). This work made use of data supplied by the UK Swift Science Data Centre at the University of Leicester.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy

    Gor Oganesyan, Samuele Ronchini, Biswajit Banerjee & Marica Branchesi

  2. INFN–Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, L’Aquila, Italy

    Gor Oganesyan, Samuele Ronchini, Biswajit Banerjee & Marica Branchesi

  3. CEICO, Institute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Sergey Karpov, Martin Mašek, Petr Janeček, Jan Ebr, Jakub Juryšek, Ronan Cunniffe & Michael Prouza

  4. Special Astrophysical Observatory, Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhniy Arkhyz, Russia

    Sergey Karpov, Gregory Beskin & Nadezhda Lyapsina

  5. Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy

    Om Sharan Salafia

  6. INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Merate, Italy

    Om Sharan Salafia

  7. Astronomical Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences (ASU CAS), Ondřejov, Czech Republic

    Martin Jelínek, Jan Štrobl, Cyril Polášek & René Hudec

  8. Kazan Federal University (KFU), Kazan, Russia

    Gregory Beskin, René Hudec, Anton Biryukov & Vyacheslav Sasyuk

  9. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Samuele Ronchini

  10. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic

    René Hudec

  11. OJS RPC PSI, Nizhniy Arkhyz, Russia

    Eugeny Ivanov, Elena Katkova & Alexey Perkov

  12. Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

    Anton Biryukov

  13. Faculty of Physics, HSE University, Moscow, Russia

    Anton Biryukov

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  1. Gor Oganesyan
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Contributions

S.K. carried out the analysis of the optical data provided by D50, FRAM-ORM and MMT-9. G.O. analysed the Swift/XRT, Swift/BAT and Fermi/GBM data. G.O. and O.S.S. led the interpretation of the multi-wavelength afterglow emission. G.O. led the writing of the paper. S.K. and O.S.S. provided major contributions to the writing of the paper. B.B. reduced the Fermi/LAT data. B.B. and S.R. collected the sample of the bright optical light curves. S.R. conducted the comparison of GRB properties with the population of long GRBs in the Amati and Yonetoku relations. M.J., G.B., J.Š., C.P., R.H., E.I., E.K., A.P., A.B., N.L., V.S., M.M., P.J., J.E., J.J., R.C. and M.P. organized the observations, ensured the operation of and provided the data from D50, FRAM-ORM and MMT-9 telescopes. All the authors contributed to discussions and edited the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gor Oganesyan.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Zhi-Ping Jin and Tanmoy Laskar for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–7 and Tables 1–12.

Supplementary Table 6

Machine-readable version of Supplementary Table 6.

Supplementary Table 7

Machine-readable version of Supplementary Table 7.

Supplementary Table 8

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Supplementary Table 9

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Oganesyan, G., Karpov, S., Salafia, O.S. et al. Exceptionally bright optical emission from a rare and distant gamma-ray burst. Nat Astron 7, 843–855 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01972-4

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