The discovery of polarization in the afterglow of GRB 990510 with the ESO Very Large Telescope

Details The discovery of polarization in the afterglow of GRB 990510 with the ESO Very Large Telescope The discovery of polarization in the afterglow of GRB 990510 with the ESO Very Large Telescope

1999-06-22

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9906346v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

submitted to ApJ Lett., 5 pages including 2 figures, uses emulateapj.sty

Scientific paper

10.1086/312262

Following a BeppoSAX alert (Piro 1999a) and the discovery of the OT at SAAO (Vreeswijk et al. 1999a), we observed GRB 990510 with the FORS instrument on ESO's VLT Unit 1 (`Antu'). The burst is unremarkable in gamma rays, but in optical is the first one to show good evidence for jet-like outflow (Stanek et al. 1999, Harrison et al. 1999). We report the detection of significant linear polarization in the afterglow: it is (1.6 +/- 0.2)% 0.86 days after trigger, and after 1.81 days is consistent with that same value, but much more uncertain. The polarization angle is constant on a time scale of hours, and may be constant over one day. We conclude that the polarization is intrinsic to the source and due to the synchrotron nature of the emission, and discuss the random and ordered field geometries that may be responsible for it.

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