TL;DR
Gamma-Ray Bursts are highly relativistic cosmic phenomena likely originating from black hole formation, offering insights into the early universe and gravitational waves, yet they remain underexplored in the relativistic community.
Contribution
This review highlights the relativistic nature of GRBs, their origins, potential gravitational wave signals, and their use as cosmological probes, emphasizing their importance in high-energy astrophysics.
Findings
GRBs involve Lorentz factors of a few hundred or more.
They are likely produced by black hole formation from supernovae or neutron star mergers.
GRBs can serve as indicators of the universe's high-redshift dark ages.
Abstract
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) - short bursts of 100-1MeV photons arriving from random directions in the sky are probably the most relativistic objects discovered so far. Still, somehow they did not attract the attention of the relativistic community. In this short review I discuss briefly GRB observations and show that they lead us to the fireball model - GRBs involve macroscopic relativistic motion with Lorentz factors of a few hundred or more. I show that GRB sources involve, most likely, new born black holes, and their progenitors are Supernovae or neutron star mergers. I show that both GRB progenitors and the process of GRB itself produce gravitational radiation and I consider the possibility of detecting this emission. Finally I show that GRBs could serve as cosmological indicators that could teach us about the high redshift () dark ages of the universe.
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