Estimating Long GRB Jet Opening Angles and Rest-Frame Energetics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to estimate long GRB jet opening angles and energetics from prompt gamma-ray data, expanding analysis to many GRBs without afterglow observations, and models the distribution of jet breaks.

Contribution

It presents a new approach using the Ghirlanda relation inversion to estimate jet angles and energetics, increasing the sample size significantly compared to previous studies.

Findings

Derived jet opening angles match those from afterglow observations.

Estimated a large fraction of jet breaks are unobservable with current tools.

Provided parameterizations for jet angle, energetics, and break distributions.

Abstract

We present a method to estimate the jet opening angles of long duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) using the prompt gamma-ray energetics and an inversion of the Ghirlanda relation, which is a correlation between the time-integrated peak energy of the GRB prompt spectrum and the collimation-corrected energy in gamma rays. The derived jet opening angles using this method and detailed assumptions match well with the corresponding inferred jet opening angles obtained when a break in the afterglow is observed. Furthermore, using a model of the predicted long GRB redshift probability distribution observable by the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), we estimate the probability distributions for the jet opening angle and rest-frame energetics for a large sample of GBM GRBs for which the redshifts have not been observed. Previous studies have only used a handful of GRBs to estimate these properties due to the paucity of observed afterglow jet breaks, spectroscopic redshifts, and comprehensive prompt gamma-ray observations, and we potentially expand the number of GRBs that can be used in this analysis by more than an order of magnitude. In this analysis, we also present an inferred distribution of jet breaks which indicates that a large fraction of jet breaks are not observable with current instrumentation and observing strategies. We present simple parameterizations for the jet angle, energetics, and jet break distributions so that they may be used in future studies.