GRB 170817A Afterglow from a Relativistic Electron–Positron Pair Wind Observed Off-axis

Abstract

Abstract A relativistic electron–positron (e + e −) pair wind from a rapidly rotating, strongly magnetized neutron star (NS) would interact with a gamma-ray burst (GRB) external shock and reshape afterglow emission signatures. Assuming that the merger remnant of GW170817 is a long-lived NS, we show that a relativistic e + e − pair wind model with a simple top-hat jet viewed off-axis can reproduce multiwavelength afterglow lightcurves and superluminal motion of GRB 170817A. The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is adopted to obtain the best-fitting parameters, which give the jet half-opening angle θ j ≈ 0.12 rad, and the viewing angle θ v ≈ 0.23 rad. The best-fitting value of θ v is close to the lower limit of the prior that is chosen based on the gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations. In addition, we also derive the initial Lorentz factor Γ0 ≈ 49 and the isotropic kinetic energy E K,iso ≈ 1× 1052 erg. Consistency between the corrected on-axis values for GRB 170817A and typical values observed for short GRBs indicates that our model can also reproduce the prompt emission of GRB 170817A. An NS with a magnetic field strength B p ≈ 1.6 × 1013 G is obtained in our fitting, indicating that a relatively low thermalization efficiency η ≲ 10−3 is needed to satisfy observational constraints on the kilonova. Furthermore, our model is able to reproduce a late-time shallow decay in the X-ray lightcurve, and predicts that the X-ray and radio flux will continue to decline in the coming years.