Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era

TL;DR

The Swift satellite has significantly advanced our understanding of gamma-ray bursts by providing rapid, high-quality multiwavelength observations, revealing new properties, and enabling studies of their environments and origins across cosmic history.

Contribution

This paper reviews how Swift's capabilities have transformed GRB research, highlighting new insights into burst properties, environments, and central engines.

Findings

Revealed diversity in burst properties

Enhanced understanding of short-duration bursts

Opened new avenues for multi-messenger observations

Abstract

With its rapid-response capability and multiwavelength complement of instruments, the Swift satellite has transformed our physical understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Providing high-quality observations of hundreds of bursts, and facilitating a wide range of follow-up observations within seconds of each event, Swift has revealed an unforeseen richness in observed burst properties, shed light on the nature of short-duration bursts, and helped realize the promise of GRBs as probes of the processes and environments of star formation out to the earliest cosmic epochs. These advances have opened new perspectives on the nature and properties of burst central engines, interactions with the burst environment from microparsec to gigaparsec scales, and the possibilities for non-photonic signatures. Our understanding of these extreme cosmic sources has thus advanced substantially; yet more than 40 years after their discovery, GRBs continue to present major challenges on both observational and theoretical fronts.