Gravo-thermal catastrophe in gravitational collapse and energy progenitor of Gamma-Ray Bursts

TL;DR

This paper models the gravitational collapse of stellar cores, revealing a process that converts gravitational energy into photon energy, forming opaque photon-pair spheres that could explain Gamma-Ray Burst progenitors.

Contribution

It introduces a gravo-thermal dynamical model of stellar core collapse that predicts photon-pair sphere formation and their properties as Gamma-Ray Burst progenitors.

Findings

Formation of opaque photon-pair spheres with specific energy, size, and temperature.

Intrinsic correlations among photon sphere properties depending on stellar core thermal index.

Potential to compare model predictions with observational Gamma-Ray Burst data.

Abstract

We study the homologous collapse of stellar nuclear core, the virial theorem for hadron collisional relaxations, and photon productions from hadron collisions. We thus show the gravo-thermal dynamical process that transforms gravitational energy to photon energy. The process is energetically and entropically favourable. The total baryon number conservation, Euler equation for energy-momentum conservation and Poisson's equation for gravitational potential are adopted to describe homologous core collapses. The virial theorem determines the hadron collision energy gain from gravitational potential. The hadronic photon production rate determines the photon energy density. The time scales of macroscopic and microscopic processes are studied to verify approximations. As a result, we show the formation of opaque photon-pair spheres, whose total energy, size, temperature and number density, accounting for the main energetic features of Gamma-Ray Burst progenitors. We obtain the intrinsic correlations of these quantities. They depend only on the averaged thermal index of the stellar core. We discuss the possibility to confront them with observational data.