A Comptonized Fireball Bubble: Physical Origin of Magnetar Giant Flares

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new model for magnetar giant flares involving an expanding fireball Comptonized by relativistic wind, successfully fitting the observed spectra of GRB 200415A and linking MGFs to short gamma-ray bursts.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, fit-able model for MGFs that incorporates Comptonization effects in an expanding fireball, providing a better understanding of their spectra and connection to short GRBs.

Findings

The model fits the spectra of GRB 200415A well.

The spectrum features a low-energy Rayleigh-Jeans component, a coherent Compton scattering region, and a high-energy tail.

The observed burst is consistent with the proposed Comptonized fireball model.

Abstract

Magnetar giant flares (MGFs) have been long proposed to contribute at least a sub-sample of the observed short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The recent discovery of the short GRB 200415A in the nearby galaxy NGC 253 established a textbook-version connection between these two phenomena. Unlike previous observations of the Galactic MGFs, the unsaturated instrument spectra of GRB 200415A provide for the first time an opportunity to test the theoretical models with the observed $\gamma$-ray photons. This paper proposed a new readily fit-able model for the MGFs, which invokes an expanding fireball Comptonized by the relativistic magnetar wind at photosphere radius. In this model, a large amount of energy is released from the magnetar crust due to the magnetic reconnection or the starquakes of the star surface and is injected into confined field lines, forming a trapped fireball bubble. After breaking through the shackles and expanding to the photospheric radius, the thermal photons of the fireball are eventually Comptonized by the relativistic $e^{\pm}$ pairs in the magnetar wind region, which produces additional higher-energy gamma-ray emission. The model predicts a modified thermal-like spectrum characterized by a low-energy component in the Rayleigh-Jeans regime, a smooth component affected by coherent Compton scattering (CC) in the intermediate energy range, and a high-energy tail due to the inverse Compton process. By performing a Monte-Carlo fit to the observational spectra of GRB 200415A, we found that the observation of the burst is entirely consistent with our model predictions.