Kilonova emission from black hole-neutron star mergers: observational signatures of anisotropic mass ejection

Abstract

The gravitational wave event GW170817 associated with the short gamma-ray burst (GRB) 170817A confirms that binary neutron star (BNS) mergers are one of the origins of short GRBs. The associated kilonova emission, radioactively powered by nucleosynthesized heavy elements, was also detected. Black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) mergers have been argued to be another promising origin candidate of short GRBs and kilonovae. Numerical simulations show that the ejecta in BH-NS mergers is geometrically much more anisotropic than the BNS merger case. In this paper, we investigate observational signatures of kilonova emission from the anisotropic ejecta in BH-NS mergers. We find that a bump appears on the bolometric luminosity light curve due to the inhomogeneous mass distribution in the latitudinal direction. The decay slope of the single-band light curve becomes flatter and the spectrum also deviates from a single-temperature blackbody radiation spectrum due to the gradient in the velocity distribution of the ejecta. Future detection or non-detection of such signatures would be useful to test the mass ejection geometry in BH-NS mergers.

arXiv commentAccepted by ApJ, 7 pages, 7 figures

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• Can a black hole-neutron star merger explain GW170817, AT2017gfo, GRB170817A?
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• A Pulsar Wind Nebula Embedded in the Kilonova AT2017gfo Associated with GW 170817/GRB 170817A
• Rotation and dispersion measure evolution of repeating fast radio bursts propagating through a magnetar flare ejecta