Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2001-06-29
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
An invited review, to appear in: Proc. IX Marcel Grossmann Meeting, eds. V. Gurzadyan, R. Jantzen, and R. Ruffini, Singapore:
Scientific paper
Cosmic gamma-ray bursts are one of the great frontiers of astrophysics today. They are a playground of relativists and observers alike. They may teach us about the death of stars and the birth of black holes, the physics in extreme conditions, and help us probe star formation in the distant and obscured universe. In this review we summarise some of the remarkable progress in this field over the past few years. While the nature of the GRB progenitors is still unsettled, it now appears likely that at least some bursts originate in explosions of very massive stars, or at least occur in or near the regions of massive star formation. The physics of the burst afterglows is reasonably well understood, and has been tested and confirmed very well by the observations. Bursts are found to be beamed, but with a broad range of jet opening angles; the mean gamma-ray energies after the beaming corrections are ~ 10^51 erg. Bursts are associated with faint
Berger Edmond
Bloom Josh S.
Chaffee Frederic
Diercks Alan
Djorgovski Stanislav G.
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