Discovery and confirmation of the shortest gamma ray burst from a collapsar

Creators: Ahumada, Tomás; Singer, Leo P.; Anand, Shreya; Coughlin, Michael W.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Ryan, Geoffrey; Andreoni, Igor; Cenko, S. Bradley; Fremling, Christoffer; Kumar, Harsh; Pang, Peter T. H.; Burns, Eric; Cunningham, Virginia; Dichiara, Simone; Dietrich, Tim; Svinkin, Dmitry S.; Almualla, Mouza; Castro-Tirado, Alberto J.; De, Kishalay; Dunwoody, Rachel; Gatkine, Pradip; Hammerstein, Erica; Iyyani, Shabnam; Mangan, Joseph; Perley, Dan; Purkayastha, Sonalika; Bellm, Eric; Bhalerao, Varun; Bolin, Bryce; Bulla, Mattia; Cannella, Christopher; Chandra, Poonam; Duev, Dmitry A.; Frederiks, Dmitry; Gal-Yam, Avishay; Graham, Matthew; Ho, Anna Y. Q.; Hurley, Kevin; Karambelkar, Viraj R.; Kool, Erik C.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Mahabal, Ashish; Masci, Frank; McBreen, Sheila; Pandey, Shashi B.; Reusch, Simeon; Ridnaia, Anna; Rosnet, Philippe; Rusholme, Benjamin; Carracedo, Ana Sagues; Smith, Roger; Soumagnac, Maayane; Stein, Robert; Troja, Eleonora; Tsvetkova, Anastasia; Walters, Richard; Valeev, Azamat F.

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the brightest and most energetic events in the universe. The duration and hardness distribution of GRBs has two clusters, now understood to reflect (at least) two different progenitors. Short-hard GRBs (SGRBs; T₉₀ <2 s) arise from compact binary mergers, while long-soft GRBs (LGRBs; T₉₀ >2 s) have been attributed to the collapse of peculiar massive stars (collapsars). The discovery of SN 1998bw/GRB 980425 marked the first association of a LGRB with a collapsar and AT 2017gfo/GRB 170817A/GW170817 marked the first association of a SGRB with a binary neutron star merger, producing also gravitational wave (GW). Here, we present the discovery of ZTF20abwysqy (AT2020scz), a fast-fading optical transient in the Fermi Satellite and the InterPlanetary Network (IPN) localization regions of GRB 200826A; X-ray and radio emission further confirm that this is the afterglow. Follow-up imaging (at rest-frame 16.5 days) reveals excess emission above the afterglow that cannot be explained as an underlying kilonova (KN), but is consistent with being the supernova (SN). Despite the GRB duration being short (rest-frame T₉₀ of 0.65 s), our panchromatic follow-up data confirms a collapsar origin. GRB 200826A is the shortest LGRB found with an associated collapsar; it appears to sit on the brink between a successful and a failed collapsar. Our discovery is consistent with the hypothesis that most collapsars fail to produce ultra-relativistic jets.

Additional Information

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This work was supported by the GROWTH (Global Relay of ObservatoriesWatching Transients Happen) project funded by the National Science Foundation under PIRE Grant No 1545949. GROWTH is a collaborative project among California Institute of Technology (USA), University of Maryland College Park (USA), University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (USA), Texas Tech University (USA), San Diego State University (USA), University of Washington (USA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), National Central University (Taiwan), Indian Institute of Astrophysics (India), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (India), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), The Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University (Sweden), Humboldt University (Germany), Liverpool John Moores University (UK) and University of Sydney (Australia). Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University ofWashington (UW), Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by Caltech Optical Observatories, IPAC, and UW. The work is partly based on the observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), installed in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, in the island of La Palma. The material is based upon work supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC17M0002. AJCT acknowledges all co-Is of the GTC proposal and the financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under the Heising-Simons Foundation grant #12540303 (PI: Graham). S.McB. and J.M. acknowledge support from Science Foundation Ireland under grant number 17/CDA/4723. R.D. acknowledges support from the Irish Research Council (IRC) under grant GOIPG/2019/2033. Analysis was performed on the YORP cluster administered by the Center for Theory and Computation, part of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center. These results also made use of Lowell Observatory's Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT), formerly the Discovery Channel Telescope. Lowell operates the LDT in partnership with Boston University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Toledo. Partial support of the LDT was provided by Discovery Communications. LMI was built by Lowell Observatory using funds from the National Science Foundation (AST-1005313). M.W. Coughlin acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation with grant number PHY-2010970. S. Anand gratefully acknowledges support from the GROWTH PIRE grant (1545949). Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. E.C. Kool acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T. research environment and the Wenner-Gren Foundations. P. T. H. P. is supported by the research program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). H. Kumar thanks the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, which is funded by LSSTC, NSF Cybertraining Grant #1829740, the Brinson Foundation, and the Moore Foundation; his participation in the program has benefited this work. S.McB. and J.M. acknowledge support from Science Foundation Ireland under grant number 17/CDA/4723. RD acknowledges support from the Irish Research Council (IRC) under grant GOIPG/2019/2033. P.C. acknowledges support from the Department of Science and Technology via Swarana Jayanti Fellowship award (file no.DST/SJF/PSA-01/2014-15). We thank the staff of the GMRT that made these observations possible. GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. We thank D. Bhattacharya, A. Vibhute, and V. Shenoy for help with CZTI analysis. The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests. Contributions. TA and LPS were the primary authors of the manuscript. MMK is the PI of GROWTH and the ZTF EM-GW program, and SBC is PI of the SGRB program. MC, SA, IA, and MA support development of the GROWTH ToO Marshal and associated program. HK and CF led the reductions of the Gemini data. EB led analysis of the Fermi gamma-ray data. GR, VC, TD, and PTHP contributed to the afterglow, KN, and SN modeling. RD and JM were the GBM burst advocates and provided gamma-ray analysis. DSS, DF, KH, AR and AT performed IPN and Konus analyses. AJCT, AV and SBP provided the GTC spectrum. KD performed the WIRC data reduction. PC and SP provided GMRT data. PG, SD and ET provided the LDT data.EH performed galaxy and SED fitting. SI and VB performed the Astrosat analyses. CC contributed to the GROWTH Marshal. BB, AG, DP, AYQH, VK, EK RS, SR, AS, RS contributed to candidate scanning, vetting, and classification. EB, DAD, MJG, RRL, SRK, FJM, AM, PR, BR, DLS, RS, MS, and RW are ZTF builders. All authors contributed to edits to the manuscript.

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