Cosmological implications of Gamma Ray Bursts

TL;DR

Gamma Ray Bursts can potentially serve as standard candles for cosmology due to their spectral-energy correlations, offering advantages over supernovae, but their underlying physics remains not fully understood.

Contribution

This paper reviews the potential of Gamma Ray Bursts as cosmological probes and discusses recent attempts to use them to constrain cosmological parameters.

Findings

Gamma Ray Bursts can be standardized for cosmology.

Initial results show promise in constraining dark energy parameters.

Spectral-energy correlations are promising but not yet fully understood.

Abstract

The discovery that the bolometric energetics (and/or peak luminosity) of Gamma Ray Bursts correlates with their spectral properties has allowed to standardize the burst energetics to such a degree to enable their use for constraining the cosmological parameters, in the same way as SN Ia. With respect to SN Ia, there is the advantage of having sources free from extinction problems, and easily detectable also at large redshifts. On the other hand, these spectral-energy correlations are not yet understood, and bursts with a complete set of information (to standardize their energetics) are still few (two dozens). There have been already attempts to use these bursts to constrain Omega_Lambda and Omega_M, and even the dark energy equation of state. These results are very encouraging.