The X-ray spectrum and lightcurve of the redshift 6.29 γ-Ray Burst GRB 050904

Details The X-ray spectrum and lightcurve of the redshift 6.29 γ-Ray Burst GRB 050904 The X-ray spectrum and lightcurve of the redshift 6.29 γ-Ray Burst GRB 050904

May 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aipc..836..582w&link_type=abstract

GAMMA-RAY BURSTS IN THE SWIFT ERA: Sixteenth Maryland Astrophysics Conference. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 836, pp. 582-

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Gamma-Ray Sources, Gamma-Ray Bursts, Photography And Photometry, X-Ray Sources, X-Ray Bursts

Scientific paper

A γ-ray burst (GRB) has been found with a redshift comparable to the most distant quasars and galaxies: GRB 050904 at z = 6.29 +/- 0.01, making it the most distant X-ray source known. The X-ray lightcurve is not a power-law like many afterglows, but is dominated by large amplitude variability from a few minutes to at least half a day. The spectra soften during this time from a power-law with photon index Γ = 1.2 to 1.9. The spectra are well-described by an absorbed power-law with possible evidence of very large intrinsic absorption. There is no evidence for discrete features. This is in spite of the spectrum's very high signal-to-noise ratio, since GRB 050904 was extraordinarily bright in X-rays. In the first days after the burst, it was by far the brightest known X-ray source at z > 4. In the first minutes after the burst, the X-ray flux was > 10-9 erg cm-2 s-1 in the 0.2-10 keV band, corresponding to an apparent luminosity between 10 5 and 106 times greater than the brightest X-ray quasars at similar distances. More photons were acquired in the first minutes with Swift-XRT than XMM-Newton and Chandra have obtained in ~ 300 ks of pointed observations of z > 5 AGN. The huge X-ray fluence detected from GRB 050904 is a clear demonstration of concept for efficient X-ray studies of the high-z IGM with new large area, high-resolution X-ray detectors, and shows that GRBs in their early phases are the only backlighting bright enough for X-ray absorption studies of the intervening matter at high redshift.

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