MAGIC observation of the GRB080430 afterglow

TL;DR

This paper reports on MAGIC telescope observations of GRB 080430's afterglow at energies above 80 GeV, providing upper limits on very-high energy emission and demonstrating the potential for ground-based telescopes to detect GRB emissions at moderate redshifts.

Contribution

The study presents the first upper limit on very-high energy emission from GRB 080430 and assesses the capability of Cherenkov telescopes to detect GRB afterglows at moderate redshifts.

Findings

Upper limit of $5.5 imes 10^{-11}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ for VHE emission

Cherenkov telescopes can detect GRB afterglows at $z \,\lesssim 0.8$ with early observations

No constraints on theoretical models due to modeling difficulties

Abstract

Context: Gamma-ray bursts are cosmological sources emitting radiation from the gamma-rays to the radio band. Substantial observational efforts have been devoted to the study of gamma-ray bursts during the prompt phase, i.e. the initial burst of high-energy radiation, and during the long-lasting afterglows. In spite of many successes in interpreting these phenomena, there are still several open key questions about the fundamental emission processes, their energetics and the environment. Aim: Independently of specific gamma-ray burst theoretical recipes, spectra in the GeV/TeV range are predicted to be remarkably simple, being satisfactorily modeled with power-laws, and therefore offer a very valuable tool to probe the extragalactic background light distribution. Furthermore, the simple detection of a component at very-high energies, i.e. at $\sim 100$\,GeV, would solve the ambiguity about the importance of various possible emission processes, which provide barely distinguishable scenarios at lower energies. Methods: We used the results of the MAGIC telescope observation of the moderate resdhift ($z\sim0.76$) \object{GRB\,080430} at energies above about 80\,GeV, to evaluate the perspective for late-afterglow observations with ground based GeV/TeV telescopes. Results: We obtained an upper limit of $F_{\rm 95%\,CL} = 5.5 \times 10^{-11}$\,erg\,cm$^{-2}$\,s$^{-1}$ for the very-high energy emission of \object{GRB\,080430}, which cannot set further constraints on the theoretical scenarios proposed for this object also due to the difficulties in modeling the low-energy afterglow. Nonetheless, our observations show that Cherenkov telescopes have already reached the required sensitivity to detect the GeV/TeV emission of GRBs at moderate redshift ($z \lesssim 0.8$), provided the observations are carried out at early times, close to the onset of their afterglow phase.