Hidden Bibliographic Details
| ISBN: | 9783319066264
3319066269
3319066250
9783319066257
9783319066257
|
|---|
| Notes: | "Doctoral thesis accepted by the University of New Mexico, USA."
Includes bibliographical references.
Online resource; title from PDF title page (SpringerLink, viewed June 10, 2014).
|
|---|
| Summary: | Nominated as an outstanding thesis by the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of New Mexico, this thesis seeks to identify the gamma-ray burst (GRB) progenitor. GRBs are extragalactic explosions that briefly outshine entire galaxies, but the mechanism that can release that much energy over a <100 second burst is still a mystery. The leading candidate for the GRB progenitor is currently a massive star which collapses to form a black hole-accretion disk system that powers the GRB. GRB afterglows, however, do not always show the expected behavior of a relativistic blast wave interacting with the stellar wind that such a progenitor should have produced before its collapse. In this book, the author uses the Zeus-MP astrophysical hydrodynamics code to model the environment around a stellar progenitor prior to the burst. He then develops a new semi-analytic MHD and emission model to produce light curves for GRBs encountering these realistic density profiles. The work ultimately shows that the circumburst medium surrounding a GRB at the time of the explosion is much more complex than a pure wind, and that observed afterglows are entirely consistent with a large subset of proposed stellar progenitors.
|
|---|
| Other form: | Printed edition: 9783319066257
|
|---|
| Standard no.: | 10.1007/978-3-319-06626-4
|
|---|
