The progenitor and central engine of a peculiar GRB 230307A

Abstract

Recently, a lack of supernova-associated long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB 230307A) at such a low redshift $z=0.065$, but associated with a possible kilonova emission, has attracted great attention. Its heavy element nucleosynthesis and the characteristic of soft X-ray emission suggests that the central engine of GRB 230307A is magnetar which is originated from a binary compact star merger. The calculated lower value of $\epsilon \sim 0.05$ suggests that the GRB 230307A seems to be with ambiguous progenitor. The lower value of $f_{\mathrm{eff}}=1.23$ implies that the GRB 230307A is not likely to be from the effect of "tip of iceberg". We adopt the magnetar central engine model to fit the observed soft X-ray emission with a varying efficiency and find that the parameters constraints of magnetar fall into a reasonable range, i.e., $B<9.4\times 10^{15}$ G and $P<2.5$ ms for ${\Gamma }_{\mathrm{sat}}=10^3$, and $B<3.6\times 10^{15}$ G and $P<1.05$ ms for ${\Gamma }_{\mathrm{sat}}=10^4$. Whether the progenitor of GBR 230307A is from the mergers of neutron star - white dwarf (NS - WD) or neutron star - neutron star (NS - NS) remains unknown.

7 pages, 1 table, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters, 962:L27, 2024