GRB 170817A Afterglow from a Relativistic Electron-Positron Pair Wind Observed Off-axis

TL;DR

This paper models the afterglow of GRB 170817A using a relativistic electron-positron pair wind from a long-lived neutron star, successfully fitting multi-wavelength observations and predicting future flux decline.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pair wind model with off-axis jet viewing angle that explains the afterglow and superluminal motion of GRB 170817A, aligning with observational data.

Findings

Reproduces multi-wavelength afterglow lightcurves.

Derives key parameters like jet angle and Lorentz factor.

Predicts continued decline of X-ray and radio flux.

Abstract

A relativistic electron-positron ($e^{+}e^{-}$) pair wind from a rapidly rotating, strongly magnetized neutron star (NS) would interact with a gamma-ray burst (GRB) external shock and reshapes afterglow emission signatures. Assuming that the merger remnant of GW170817 is a long-lived NS, we show that a relativistic $e^{+}e^{-}$ pair wind model with a simple top-hat jet viewed off-axis can reproduce multi-wavelength afterglow lightcurves and superluminal motion of GRB 170817A. The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is adopted to obtain the best-fitting parameters, which give the jet half-opening angle $\theta_{j}\approx0.11$ rad, and the viewing angle $\theta_{v}\approx0.23$ rad. The best-fitting value of $\theta_{v}$ is close to the lower limit of the prior which is chosen based on the gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations. In addition, we also derive the initial Lorentz factor $\Gamma_{0}\approx47$ and the isotropic kinetic energy $E_{\rm K,iso}\approx2\times10^{52}\rm\ erg$. A consistence between the corrected on-axis values for GRB 170817A and typical values observed for short GRBs indicates that our model can also reproduce the prompt emission of GRB 170817A. An NS with a magnetic field strength $B_{p}\approx1.6\times10^{13}\rm\ G$ is obtained in our fitting, indicating that a relatively low thermalization efficiency $\eta\lesssim10^{-3}$ is needed to satisfy observational constraints on the kilonova. Furthermore, our model is able to reproduce a late-time shallow decay in the X-ray lightcurve and predicts that the X-ray and radio flux will continue to decline in the coming years.