Abstract

The recent discovery of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) coincident with the gravitational-wave (GW) event GW170817 revealed the existence of a population of low-luminosity short duration gamma-ray transients produced by neutron star mergers in the nearby Universe. These events could be routinely detected by existing gamma-ray monitors, yet previous observations failed to identify them without the aid of GW triggers. Here we show that GRB150101B is an analogue of GRB170817A located at a cosmological distance. GRB150101B is a faint short burst characterized by a bright optical counterpart and a long-lived X-ray afterglow. These properties are unusual for standard short GRBs and are instead consistent with an explosion viewed off-axis: the optical light is produced by a luminous kilonova, while the observed X-rays trace the GRB afterglow viewed at an angle of ~13°. Our findings suggest that these properties could be common among future electromagnetic counterparts of GW sources.

Details

Title
A luminous blue kilonova and an off-axis jet from a compact binary merger at z = 0.1341
Author
Troja, E 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Ryan, G 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Piro, L 3 ; H van Eerten 4 ; Cenko, S B 5   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Yoon, Y 6 ; S-K, Lee 6 ; M Im 6 ; Sakamoto, T 7 ; Gatkine, P 8 ; Kutyrev, A 1 ; Veilleux, S 9 

 Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA; Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA 
 Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA 
 INAF, Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome, Italy 
 Department of Physics, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, UK 
 Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA; Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA 
 Center for the Exploration for the Origin of the Universe, Astronomy Program, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea 
 Department of Physics and Mathematics, Aoyama Gakuin University, Sagamihara-shi Kanagawa, Japan 
 Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA 
 Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA; Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA 
Pages
1-10
Publication year
2018
Publication date
Oct 2018
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20411723
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2120717991
Copyright
© 2018. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.