Go Long, Go Deep: Finding Optical Jet Breaks for Swift-Era GRBs with the LBT

TL;DR

This study used the Large Binocular Telescope to observe six GRB afterglows over extended periods, successfully detecting late-time jet breaks and demonstrating that previous non-detections were due to observational limitations.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic late-time optical observations of GRB afterglows, extending jet break detection capabilities and clarifying the collimation of GRBs.

Findings

Detected two confirmed jet breaks and one candidate.

Extended the temporal baseline for jet break detection by a decade.

Showed that non-detections are often due to observational challenges.

Abstract

Using the 8.4m Large Binocular Telescope, we observed six GRB afterglows from 2.8 hours to 30.8 days after the burst triggers to systematically probe the late time behaviors of afterglows including jet breaks, flares, and supernova bumps. We detected five afterglows with Sloan r' magnitudes ranging from 23.0-26.3 mag. The depth of our observations allows us to extend the temporal baseline for measuring jet breaks by another decade in time scale. We detected two jet breaks and a third candidate, all of which are not detectable without deep, late time optical observations. In the other three cases, we do not detect the jet breaks either because of contamination from the host galaxy light, the presence of a supernova bump, or the intrinsic faintness of the optical afterglow. This suggests that the basic picture that GRBs are collimated is still valid and that the apparent lack of Swift jet breaks is due to poorly sampled afterglow light curves, particularly at late times.