MAGIC low energy observation of GRB090102 afterglow

TL;DR

This paper reports on MAGIC telescope observations of GRB090102, providing upper limits on its GeV/TeV emission and demonstrating the telescope's potential to explore the high-energy regime of gamma-ray bursts, bridging observational gaps.

Contribution

First to analyze GRB090102 with MAGIC, setting upper limits on high-energy emission and highlighting MAGIC's role in multiwavelength GRB studies.

Findings

Results are compatible with theoretical emission models.

No definitive detection of GeV/TeV emission was made.

MAGIC's low energy threshold enhances GRB high-energy observations.

Abstract

Hints for a GeV component in the emission from GRBs are known since the EGRET observations during the '90s and they have been recently confirmed by the data of the Fermi satellite. These results have, however, shown that a fully satisfactory interpretative framework of the GRB phenomena is still lacking. The MAGIC telescope opens the possibility to extend the measurement of GRBs in the several tens up to hundreds of GeV energy range. From the theoretical point of view, both leptonic and hadronic processes have been suggested to explain the possible GeV/TeV counterpart of GRBs. Observations with ground-based telescopes of very high energy photons (E>30 GeV) from these sources are going to play a key role in discriminating among the different proposed emission mechanisms which are barely distinguishable at lower energies. MAGIC telescope observations of the GRB090102 (z=1.547) field from 03:14:52 UT to 06:54:01 UT are analyzed to derive upper limits to the GeV/TeV emission. We compare these results to the expected emissions evaluated for different processes in the framework of the standard fireball model. The results we obtained are compatible with the expected emission but cannot yet set further constraints on the theoretical scenario. However, the difficulty in modeling the low energy data for this event makes it difficult to fix in an unambiguous way the physical parameters which describe the fireball. Nonetheless, the MAGIC telescope, thanks to its low energy threshold and fast repositioning, is opening for the first time the possibility to fill the energy gap between space-based gamma detectors and the ground-based measurements. This will makes possible GRBs multiwavelength studies in the very high energy domain.