Abstract
Abstract GRB 170817A was a subluminous short gamma-ray burst detected about 1.74 s after the gravitational wave signal GW170817 from a binary neutron star (BNS) merger. It is now understood as an off-axis event powered by the cocoon of a relativistic jet pointing 15°–30° away from the direction of observation. The cocoon was energized by the interaction of the incipient jet with the non-relativistic baryon wind from the merger remnant, resulting in a structured outflow with a narrow core and broad wings. In this paper, we couple the observational constraints on the structured outflow with a model for the jet–wind interaction to constrain the intrinsic properties with which the jet was launched by the central engine, including its time delay from the merger event. Using wind prescriptions inspired by magnetized BNS merger simulations, we find that the jet was launched within about 0.4 s from the merger, implying that the 1.74 s observed delay was dominated by the fireball propagation up to the photospheric radius. We also constrain, for the first time for any gamma-ray burst, the jet opening angle at injection and set a lower limit to its asymptotic Lorentz factor. These findings suggest an initially Poynting-flux dominated jet, launched via electromagnetic processes. If the jet was powered by an accreting black hole, they also provide a significant constraint on the survival time of the metastable neutron star remnant.
Highlights
The discovery of the gravitational wave source GW170817 (Abbott et al 2017b) marked the first detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from a binary neutron star (BNS) merger
GRB 170817A was a subluminous short gamma-ray burst detected about 1.74 s after the gravitational wave signal GW170817 from a binary neutron star (BNS) merger
Using wind prescriptions inspired by magnetized BNS merger simulations, we find that the jet was launched within about 0.4 s from the merger, implying that the 1.74 s observed delay was dominated by the fireball propagation up to the photospheric radius
Summary
The discovery of the gravitational wave source GW170817 (Abbott et al 2017b) marked the first detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from a binary neutron star (BNS) merger. The later X-ray (Troja et al 2017) and radio emission (Hallinan et al 2017), first detected 10 days after the trigger, followed a single power-law spectrum over more than eight orders of magnitude in energy (Lyman et al 2018) This suggested an origin in a blastwave, and the spectral-temporal characteristics of the observed radiation were used to constrain the properties of the emission region. It was only with VLA observations that the presence of a relativistic collimated jet – suggested by early modeling (Lazzati et al 2018; Ioka & Nakamura 2018) and by the steep radio decay (Lamb et al.2018, 2019)– was confirmed beyond doubt (Ghirlanda et al 2019; Mooley et al 2018), establishing the consistency with a standard, cosmological SGRB observed off-axis
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