A new era of sub-millimeter GRB afterglow follow-ups with the Greenland Telescope

TL;DR

The Greenland Telescope will enable rapid submillimeter follow-ups of GRBs, providing new insights into early afterglow emissions, shock physics, and high-redshift star explosions, advancing GRB research significantly.

Contribution

This paper introduces the Greenland Telescope as a new facility for rapid submm GRB follow-ups, highlighting its potential to achieve key scientific goals in GRB studies.

Findings

GLT can detect early reverse shock emissions in GRBs

Continuous monitoring of forward and reverse shocks is feasible with GLT

Systematic rapid follow-ups can identify high-redshift GRBs from first-generation stars

Abstract

A planned rapid submillimeter (submm) Gamma Ray Burst (GRBs) follow-up observations conducted using the Greenland Telescope (GLT) is presented. The GLT is a 12-m submm telescope to be located at the top of the Greenland ice sheet, where the high-altitude and dry weather porvides excellent conditions for observations at submm wavelengths. With its combination of wavelength window and rapid responding system, the GLT will explore new insights on GRBs. Summarizing the current achievements of submm GRB follow-ups, we identify the following three scientific goals regarding GRBs: (1) systematic detection of bright submm emissions originating from reverse shock (RS) in the early afterglow phase, (2) characterization of forward shock and RS emissions by capturing their peak flux and frequencies and performing continuous monitoring, and (3) detections of GRBs as a result of the explosion of first-generation stars result of GRBs at a high redshift through systematic rapid follow ups. The light curves and spectra calculated by available theoretical models clearly show that the GLT could play a crucial role in these studies.