Early ($<$0.3 day) R-band light curve of the optical afterglow of GRB030329

Abstract

We observed the optical afterglow of the bright gamma-ray burst GRB030329 on the nights of 2003 March 29, using the Kiso observatory (the University of Tokyo) 1.05 m Schmidt telescope. Data were taken from March 29 13:21:26 UT to 17:43:16 (0.072 to 0.253 days after the burst), using an $Rc$-band filter. The obtained $Rc$-band light curve has been fitted successfully by a single power law function with decay index of $0.891\pm 0.004$. These results remain unchanged when incorporating two early photometric data points at 0.065 and 0.073 days, reported by Price et al.(2003) using the SSO 40 inch telescope, and further including RTT150 data (Burenin et al. 2003) covering at about 0.3 days. Over the period of 0.065-0.285 days after the burst, any deviation from the power-law decay is smaller than $\pm$0.007 mag. The temporal structure reported by Uemura et al. (2003) does not show up in our $R$-band light curve.

arXiv comment9 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in ApJL

References in corpus (7)

• A very energetic supernova associated with the gamma-ray burst of 29 March 2003
• Spectroscopic Discovery of the Supernova 2003dh Associated with GRB 030329
• Optical Photometry and Spectroscopy of the SN 1998bw-like Type Ic Supernova 2002ap
• The bright optical afterglow of the nearby gamma-ray burst of 29 March 2003
• Structure in the early afterglow lightcurve of the gamma-ray burst of 29 March 2003
• The Earliest Optical Observations of GRB 030329
• First hours of the GRB 030329 optical afterglow

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