Cosmological Fast Optical Transients with the Zwicky Transient Facility: A Search for Dirty Fireballs

Creators: Ho, Anna Y. Q.; Perley, Daniel A.; Yao, Yuhan; Svinkin, Dmitry; de Ugarte Postigo, A.; Perley, R. A.; Kann, D. Alexander; Burns, Eric; Andreoni, Igor; Bellm, Eric C.; Bissaldi, Elisabetta; Bloom, Joshua S.; Dekany, Richard; Drake, Andrew J.; Agüí Fernández, José Feliciano; Frederiks, Dmitry; Graham, Matthew J.; Hristov, Boyan A.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Kulkarni, S. R.; Kumar, Harsh; Laher, Russ R.; Lysenko, Alexandra L.; Mailyan, Bagrat; Malacaria, Christian; Miller, A. A.; Poolakkil, S.; Riddle, Reed; Ridnaia, Anna; Rusholme, Ben; Savchenko, Volodymyr; Sollerman, Jesper; Thöne, Christina; Tsvetkova, Anastasia; Ulanov, Mikhail; von Kienlin, Andreas

Abstract

Dirty fireballs are a hypothesized class of relativistic massive-star explosions with an initial Lorentz factor Γ_(init) below the Γ_(init) ∼ 100 required to produce a long-duration gamma-ray burst (LGRB), but which could still produce optical emission resembling LGRB afterglows. Here we present the results of a search for on-axis optical afterglows using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). Our search yielded seven optical transients that resemble on-axis LGRB afterglows in terms of their red colors (g−r > 0 mag), faint host galaxy (r > 23 mag), and rapid fading (dr/dt > 1 mag/day). Spectroscopy of the transient emission within a few days of discovery established cosmological distances (z = 0.876 to z = 2.9) for six events, tripling the number of afterglows with redshift measurements discovered by optical surveys without a γ-ray trigger. Upon a retrospective search, four events (ZTF20abbiixp/AT2020kym, ZTF21aagwbjr/AT2021buv, ZTF21aakruew/AT2021cwd, ZTF21abfmpwn/AT2021qbd) turned out to have a likely associated LGRB (GRB200524A, GRB210204A, GRB210212B, GRB210610B), while three did not (ZTF20aajnksq/AT2020blt, ZTF21aaeyldq/AT2021any, ZTF21aayokph/AT2021lfa). Our search revealed no definitive new class of events: the simplest explanation for the apparently "orphan" events is that they were regular LGRBs missed by high-energy satellites due to detector sensitivity and duty cycle, although it is possible that they were intrinsically faint in γ-rays or viewed slightly off-axis. We rule out a scenario in which dirty fireballs have a similar energy per solid angle to LGRBs and are an order of magnitude more common. In addition, we set the first direct constraint on the ratio of the opening angles of the material producing γ-rays and the material producing early optical afterglow emission, finding that they must be comparable.

Additional Information

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). We acknowledge with gratitude the contributions of the late Kevin Hurley in founding and maintaining the Interplanetary Network, which was essential for this work. A.Y.Q.H. would like to thank Ragnhild Lunnan for helpful comments on the manuscript; and Eliot Quataert, Dan Kasen, Andrew MacFadyen, and Paul Duffell for fruitful discussions about jet structure and dirty fireballs. D.A.P.'s contribution was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611. This work was partially supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation. D.F., A.T., and M.U. acknowledge support from RSF grant 21-12-00250. D.A.K. and J.F.A.F acknowledges support from Spanish National Research Project RTI2018-098104-J-I00 (GRBPhot). H.K. thanks the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, which is funded by LSSTC, NSF Cybertraining Grant #1829740, Brinson and Moore Foundations. J.F.A.F. acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades through the grant PRE2018-086507. 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 Grants No. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including current partners Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IN2P3, University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum, Northwestern University and former partners the University of Washington, Los Alamos National Laboratories, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. SED Machine is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1106171. Based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF's NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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