GRB 170817A Afterglow from a Relativistic Electron-Positron Pair Wind Observed Off-axis

Abstract

A relativistic electron-positron ($e^{+}{e}^{-}$) pair wind from a rapidly rotating, strongly magnetized neutron star (NS) would interact with a gamma-ray burst (GRB) external shock and reshapes afterglow emission signatures. Assuming that the merger remnant of GW170817 is a long-lived NS, we show that a relativistic $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ pair wind model with a simple top-hat jet viewed off-axis can reproduce multi-wavelength afterglow lightcurves and superluminal motion of GRB 170817A. The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is adopted to obtain the best-fitting parameters, which give the jet half-opening angle $\hat{I}{¸}_j\approx 0.11$ rad, and the viewing angle $\hat{I}{¸}_v\approx 0.23$ rad. The best-fitting value of $\hat{I}{¸}_v$ is close to the lower limit of the prior which is chosen based on the gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations. In addition, we also derive the initial Lorentz factor $\hat{I}{“}_0\approx 47$ and the isotropic kinetic energy $E_{\mathrm{K},\mathrm{iso}}\approx 2\times 10^{52}\mathrm{erg}$. A consistence between the corrected on-axis values for GRB 170817A and typical values observed for short GRBs indicates that our model can also reproduce the prompt emission of GRB 170817A. An NS with a magnetic field strength $B_p\approx 1.6\times 10^{13}\mathrm{G}$ is obtained in our fitting, indicating that a relatively low thermalization efficiency $\hat{I}\cdot \lesssim 10^{-3}$ is needed to satisfy observational constraints on the kilonova. Furthermore, our model is able to reproduce a late-time shallow decay in the X-ray lightcurve and predicts that the X-ray and radio flux will continue to decline in the coming years.

16 pages including 10 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ