Gamma Ray Bursts -- A radio perspective

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of radio observations in understanding gamma-ray bursts, highlighting current limitations and future prospects with upcoming telescopes to explore their energetics and environments.

Contribution

It emphasizes the potential of future radio telescopes to significantly enhance the study of GRBs' energetics and environments, addressing current observational limitations.

Findings

Radio observations detect only 30% of GRBs.

Upcoming telescopes will increase detection and follow-up capabilities.

Radio data can help answer key questions about GRB environments.

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are extremely energetic events at cosmological distances. They provide unique laboratory to investigate fundamental physical processes under extreme conditions. Due to extreme luminosities, GRBs are detectable at very high redshifts and potential tracers of cosmic star formation rate at early epoch. While the launch of {\it Swift} and {\it Fermi} has increased our understanding of GRBs tremendously, many new questions have opened up. Radio observations of GRBs uniquely probe the energetics and environments of the explosion. However, currently only 30\% of the bursts are detected in radio bands. Radio observations with upcoming sensitive telescopes will potentially increase the sample size significantly, and allow one to follow the individual bursts for a much longer duration and be able to answer some of the important issues related to true calorimetry, reverse shock emission and environments around the massive stars exploding as GRBs in the early Universe.