Gamma ray bursts
Astrophysics seminar Fall 2004
Organizers: Phil Armitage and Mitch Begelman

Note: a university IP address is needed to download most of these papers.

  The aim of the astrophysics seminar is discuss recent developments in a forefront area of astronomy. For this semester, in part with an eye to the upcoming launch of SWIFT, the topic is Gamma-Ray bursts. Each week one or two people will pick papers from the list below, read them, and lead a discussion in class. Animated discussion rather than a first-class colloquium is the goal, so although a video projector and overhead projector will be provided for the presenters we'll ruthlessly cut-off presentations that threaten to consume the entire class!

  In addition to the discussion leaders, everyone else is expected to expected to read the papers too, and come up with a handful of questions which the discussion leaders and everyone else will try to resolve. Since it's almost impossible to answer a really intelligent question intelligently `cold', questions emailed to me the day before each meeting will be posted here so that we can all think about them in advance.

  A formal course syllabus explains the rules of the game in a bit more detail.

General review relevant to many aspects of GRBs
Gamma-Ray Bursts: Progress, Problems & Prospects (Zhang & Meszaros 2004)
August 26th Introduction
Gamma-Ray Bursts: Accumulating Afterglow Implications, Progenitor Clues, and Prospects (Meszaros 2001)
September 2nd Basic observations
Gamma-Ray Bursts (Fishman & Meegan 1995)
September 9th Fireballs
Relativistic fireballs and their impact on external matter (Meszaros & Rees 1992)
September 16th Afterglows I
Discovery of an X-ray afterglow associated with the gamma-ray burst of 28 February 1997 (Costa et al. 1997)
Shocked by GRB 970228: the afterglow of a cosmological fireball (Wijers, Rees & Meszaros 1997)
September 23rd Afterglows II
Jets in Gamma-Ray Bursts (Sari, Piran & Halpern 1999)
Beaming in Gamma-Ray Bursts: Evidence for a Standard Energy Reservoir (Frail et al. 2001)
September 30th Fall break
October 7th GRB - supernova association
A very energetic supernova associated with the gamma-ray burst of 29 March 2003 (Hjorth et al. 2003)
Spectroscopic Discovery of the Supernova 2003dh Associated with GRB 030329 (Stanek et al. 2003)
October 14th Progenitors I
Colliding neutron stars... (Ruffert & Janka 1998)
October 21st Progenitors II
Collapsars: Gamma-Ray Bursts and Explosions in "Failed Supernovae" (MacFadyen & Woosley 1999)
October 28th Progenitor statistics
Constraints on Off-Axis Gamma-Ray Burst Jets in Type Ibc Supernovae from Late-Time Radio Observations (Soderberg, Frail & Wieringa 2004)
The Rates of Hypernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts: Implications for Their Progenitors (Podsiadlowski et al. 2004)
November 4th GRBs as tracers of star formation
Gamma-ray bursts from stellar remnants... (Wijers et al. 1998)
Cosmological Aspects of Gamma-Ray Bursts... (Lloyd-Ronning, Fryer & Ramirez-Ruiz 2002)
November 11th Optical flashes
Observation of contemporaneous optical radiation from a gamma-ray burst (Akerlof et al. 1999)
Predictions for the Very Early Afterglow and the Optical Flash (Sari & Piran 1999)
November 18th X-ray flashes
Spectral analysis of 35 GRBs/XRFs observed with HETE-2/FREGATE (Barraud et al. 2003)
A Redshift Determination for XRF 020903: First Spectroscopic Observations of an X-Ray Flash (Soderberg et al. 2004)
November 23rd (Tuesday) Interaction with the ISM
Determining the location of gamma-ray bursts through the evolution of their soft X-ray absorption (Lazzati & Perna 2002)
The optical afterglow of the not so dark GRB 021211 (Pandey et al. 2003)
December 2nd GRBs from the first stars
Gamma-Ray Bursts as a Probe of the Very High Redshift Universe (Lamb & Reichart 2000)
December 9th Neutrinos from GRBs
Neutrino Afterglow from Gamma-Ray Bursts (Waxman & Bahcall 1997)
Gamma-ray bursts from the first stars: neutrino signals (Schneider, Guetta & Ferrara 2002)