Estimates of the Early Electromagnetic Emission from Compact Binary Mergers

Abstract

Abstract Compact binary mergers that involve at least one neutron star, either binary neutron star or black hole–neutron star coalescences, are thought to be the potential sources of electromagnetic emission due to the material ejected during the merger or those left outside the central object after the merger. Since the intensity of these electromagnetic transients decays rapidly with time, one should pay more attention to early emissions from such events, which are useful in revealing the nature of these mergers. In this work, we study the early emission of kilonovae, short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and cocoons that could be produced in those mergers. We estimate their luminosities and timescales as functions of the chirp mass, which is the most readily constrained parameter from the gravitational wave detections of these events. We focus on the range of chirp mass as 1.3–2.7 M ⊙, which is compatible with one of the merging components being a so-called “mass gap” black hole. We show that the electromagnetic observation of these transients could be used to distinguish the types of the mergers when the detected chirp mass falls in the range of 1.5–1.7 M ⊙. Applying our analysis to the subthreshold GRB GBM-190816, we found that for this particular event the effective spin should be larger than 0.6 and the mass of the heavier object might be larger than 5.5 M ⊙ for the phenomenological Steiner–Fischer–Hempel equation of state.