Pair Fireball Precursors of Neutron Star Mergers
Brian D. Metzger, Charles Zivancev

TL;DR
This paper models electromagnetic precursors to neutron star mergers, predicting gamma-ray fireball emissions detectable only within a limited distance, and suggests possible non-thermal signals like radio bursts from reconnection events.
Contribution
It introduces a steady-state pair wind model to quantify gamma-ray precursor detectability and explores non-thermal emissions from Poynting flux reconnection outside the pair photosphere.
Findings
Gamma-ray detection horizon is ~10 Mpc for typical magnetic fields.
Weaker magnetic fields could produce nearby short gamma-ray bursts.
Reconnection outside the pair photosphere may generate millisecond radio bursts.
Abstract
If at least one neutron star (NS) is magnetized in a binary NS merger, then the orbital motion of the conducting companion during the final inspiral induces a strong voltage and current along the magnetic field lines connecting the NSs. If a modest fraction, eta, of the extracted electromagnetic power extracted accelerates relativistic particles, the resulting gamma-ray emission a compact volume will result in the formation of an electron-positron pair fireball. Applying a steady-state pair wind model, we quantify the detectability of the precursor fireball with gamma-ray satellites. For eta ~ 1 the gamma-ray detection horizon of D_max ~ 10(Bd/1e14 G)^{3/4} Mpc is much closer than the Advanced LIGO/Virgo horizon of 200 Mpc, unless the NS surface magnetic field strength is very large, Bd > 1e15 G. Given the quasi-isotropic nature of the emission, mergers with weaker NS fields could…
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