Evolution of jets driven by relativistic radiation hydrodynamics as Long and Low Luminosity GRBs

TL;DR

This paper presents 3D simulations of relativistic jets driven by radiation hydrodynamics, comparing their evolution and luminosity profiles in different environments and initial conditions, revealing insights into long and low-luminosity gamma-ray bursts.

Contribution

The study introduces detailed 3D RRH simulations of jets in stratified media and progenitor stars, analyzing radiation effects on jet dynamics and luminosity, which advances understanding of GRB emission mechanisms.

Findings

Radiation pressure dominated jets propagate faster than gas pressure dominated jets.

Jets in stratified media produce luminosities comparable to typical long GRBs.

Jets breaking out from progenitors have luminosities similar to low-luminosity GRBs and exhibit large temperature differences.

Abstract

We present the three-dimensional numerical simulation of jets modeled with Relativistic Radiation Hydrodynamics (RRH), that evolve across two environments: i) a stratified surrounding medium and ii) a 16TI progenitor model. We consider opacities consistent with various processes of interaction between the fluid and radiation, specifically, free-free, bound-free, bound-bound and electron scattering. We explore various initial conditions, with different radiation energy densities of the beam in hydrodynamical and radiation pressure dominated scenarios, considering only ultra-relativistic jets. In order to investigate the impact of the radiation field on the evolution of the jets, we compare our results with purely hydrodynamical jets. Comparing among jets driven by RRH, we find that radiation pressure dominated jets propagate slightly faster than gas pressure dominated ones. Finally, we construct the luminosity Light Curves (LCs) associated with all these cases. The construction of LCs uses the fluxes of the radiation field which is fully coupled to the hydrodynamics equations during the evolution. The main properties of the jets propagating on the stratified surrounding medium are that the LCs show the same order of magnitude as the gamma-ray luminosity of typical Long Gamma-Ray Bursts $10^{50}-10^{54}$erg/s and the difference between the radiation and gas temperatures is of nearly one order of magnitude. The properties of jets breaking out from the progenitor star model are that the LCs are of the order of magnitude of low-luminosity GRBs $10^{46}-10^{49}$ erg/s, and in this scenario the difference between the gas and radiation temperature is of four orders of magnitude, which is a case far from thermal equilibrium.