The cannonball model of long GRBs - overview

TL;DR

The paper reviews the cannonball (CB) model of gamma-ray bursts, demonstrating how its two radiation mechanisms, inverse Compton scattering and synchrotron radiation, accurately explain observed GRB emissions and light-curve structures.

Contribution

It provides an overview of the CB model's predictions and their successful confrontation with extensive observational data over ten years.

Findings

The CB model's mechanisms accurately describe prompt and afterglow emissions.

The model explains complex GRB light-curve structures across frequencies.

Predictions consistently match observational data from multiple GRBs.

Abstract

During the past ten years, the predictions of the cannonball (CB) model of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) were repeatedly confronted with the mounting data from space- and ground-based observations of GRBs and their afterglows (AGs). The two underlying radiation mechanisms of the model, inverse Compton scattering (ICS) and synchrotron radiation (SR), provided an accurate description of the prompt and afterglow emission in all of the many well-sampled GRBs that were studied. Simple as they are, these two mechanisms and the burst environment were shown to generate the observed rich structure of the GRB light-curves at all observed frequencies and times.