Fermi-LAT Detection of a GeV Afterglow from a Compact Stellar Merger

TL;DR

This paper reports the detection of a long-lasting GeV afterglow from a short-duration gamma-ray burst, supporting the idea that some long GRBs originate from compact stellar mergers rather than massive star collapse.

Contribution

It presents the first detection of a GeV afterglow lasting 20,000 seconds from a short GRB, linking it to a compact stellar merger origin.

Findings

Detected a 20,000-second GeV afterglow from GRB 211211A

The afterglow's spectrum suggests synchrotron emission with limited maximum energy

Long duration is explained by low-density environment and jet deceleration

Abstract

It is usually thought that long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are associated with massive star core collapse, whereas short-duration GRBs are associated with mergers of compact stellar binaries. The discovery of a kilonova associated with a nearby (350 Mpc) long-duration GRB-GRB 211211A, however, indicates that the progenitor of this long-duration GRB is a compact object merger. Here we report the Fermi-LAT detection of gamma-ray ($>100 {\rm \ MeV}$) afterglow emission from GRB 211211A, which lasts $\sim$20,000 s after the burst, the longest event for conventional short-duration GRBs ever detected. We suggest that this gamma-ray emission results from afterglow synchrotron emission. The soft spectrum of GeV emission may arise from a limited maximum synchrotron energy of only a few hundreds of MeV at $\sim$20,000 s. The unusually long duration of the GeV emission could be due to the proximity of this GRB and the long deceleration time of the GRB jet that is expanding in a low-density circumburst medium, consistent with the compact stellar merger scenario.