A structured jet explains the extreme GRB 221009A

Creators: O'Connor, Brendan; Troja, Eleonora; Ryan, Geoffrey; Beniamini, Paz; van Eerten, Hendrik; Granot, Jonathan; Dichiara, Simone; Ricci, Roberto; Lipunov, Vladimir; Gillanders, James H.; Gill, Ramandeep; Moss, Michael; Anand, Shreya; Andreoni, Igor; Becerra, Rosa L.; Buckley, David A. H.; Butler, Nathaniel R.; Cenko, Stephen B.; Chasovnikov, Aristarkh; Durbak, Joseph; Francile, Carlos; Hammerstein, Erica; van der Horst, Alexander J.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Kouveliotou, Chryssa; Kutyrev, Alexander S.; Lee, William H.; Srinivasaragavan, Gokul P.; Topolev, Vladislav; Watson, Alan M.; Yang, Yuhan; Zhirkov, Kirill

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Abstract

Long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are powerful cosmic explosions, signaling the death of massive stars. Among them, GRB 221009A is by far the brightest burst ever observed. Because of its enormous energy (Eᵢₛₒ ≈ 10⁵⁵ erg) and proximity (z ≈ 0.15), GRB 221009A is an exceptionally rare event that pushes the limits of our theories. We present multiwavelength observations covering the first 3 months of its afterglow evolution. The x-ray brightness decays as a power law with slope ≈ t^(−1.66), which is not consistent with standard predictions for jetted emission. We attribute this behavior to a shallow energy profile of the relativistic jet. A similar trend is observed in other energetic GRBs, suggesting that the most extreme explosions may be powered by structured jets launched by a common central engine.

Additional Information

© 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). B.O. acknowledges useful discussions with O. Fox, T. Jacovich, and S. Chastain and thanks J. Bauer and Q. Ye for assistance obtaining the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) observations. We acknowledge the ATCA staff, particularly M. Wieringa, for helpful discussions. I.A. is a Neil Gehrels Fellow. This work was supported by the European Research Council through the Consolidator grant BHianca (grant agreement ID 101002761) and by the National Science Foundation (under award number 12850). The development of afterglow models used in this work was partially supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme under the AHEAD2020 project (grant agreement number 871158). P.B.'s research was supported by a grant (number 2020747) from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel. J.G.'s research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation–National Natural Science Foundation of China joint research program under grant number 3296/19. R.G. acknowledges financial support from the UNAM-DGAPA-PAPIIT IA105823 grant, Mexico. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported, in part, by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities. The material is based on work supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002, and based on observations obtained with MASTER, which is supported by the Development Program of Lomonosov MSU and the UNU Astrophysical Complex of MSU-ISU (agreement EB-075-15-2021-675). Author contributions: B.O. was lead on this project and organized the team, performed the multiwavelength data analysis, and contributed to the interpretation of results and writing of the manuscript. E.T. formulated the project, contributed to the interpretation of the dataset and writing of the manuscript, and provided feedback on the analysis techniques. E.T. and S.D. contributed to the analysis and interpretation of the x-ray data. G.R., P.B., H.v.E., J.G., R.G., and A.J.v.d.H. contributed to the theoretical interpretation and the writing of the manuscript. P.B. proposed the structured jet model. G.R. performed the modeling of the dataset with assistance from H.v.E. and R.G. S.D., J.G., and M.M. assisted in editing the manuscript. R.R. analyzed the radio data. V.L., D.A.H.B., A.C., C.F., V.T., and K.Z. acquired, reduced, and analyzed the MASTER data. S.A. and M.M.K. acquired and reduced the P200 data. R.L.B., N.R.B., W.H.L., and A.M.W. acquired, reduced, and analyzed the COATLI data. B.O., S.B.C., J.D., E.H., I.A., A.S.K., and G.P.S. acquired and reduced the LDT data. B.O. acquired, reduced, and analyzed the Gemini data. Y.Y. compiled the list of bright historical long GRBs. All authors provided feedback on the manuscript. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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