Eighteen Years of Kilonova Discoveries with Swift
arXiv:2305.18531 · doi:10.3390/universe9060245
Abstract
Swift has now completed 18 years of mission, during which it discovered thousands of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as well as new classes of high-energy transient phenomena. Its first breakthrough result was the localization of short duration GRBs, which enabled for redshift measurements and kilonova searches. Swift, in synergy with the Hubble Space Telescope and a wide array of ground-based telescopes, provided the first tantalizing evidence of a kilonova in the aftermath of a short GRB. In 2017, Swift observations of the gravitational wave event GW170817 captured the early UV photons from the kilonova AT2017gfo, opening a new window into the physics of kilonovae. Since then, Swift has continued to expand the sample of known kilonovae, leading to the surprising discovery of a kilonova in a long duration GRB. This article will discuss recent advances in the study of kilonovae driven by the fundamental contribution of Swift.
26 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Published as part of the Special Issue "18 Years of Science with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory's Ultra-Violet/Optical Telescope"
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- The puzzling long GRB 191019A: Evidence for Kilonova Light
- Kilonova Light-Curve Interpolation with Neural Networks
- Interpolated kilonova spectra models: necessity for a phenomenological, blue component in the fitting of AT2017gfo spectra
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- Generalized Linear Models of T-T relation to classify GRBs