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Effective absorbing column density in the gamma-ray burst afterglow X-ray spectra

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, ISSN: 1365-2966, Vol: 441, Issue: 4, Page: 3634-3639
2014
  • 9
    Citations
  • 0
    Usage
  • 12
    Captures
  • 0
    Mentions
  • 0
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    9
    • Citation Indexes
      9
  • Captures
    12

Article Description

We investigate the scaling relation between the observed amount of absorption in the X-ray spectra of gamma-ray burst afterglows and the absorber redshift. Through dedicated numerical simulations of an ideal instrument, we establish that this dependence has a power-law shape with index 2.4. However, for real instruments, this value depends on their low-energy cut-off, spectral resolution and on the detector spectral response in general.We thus provide appropriate scaling laws for specific instruments. Finally,we discuss the possibility to measure the absorber redshift from X-ray data alone.We find that 10-10 counts in the 0.3-10 keVband are needed to constrain the redshift with 10 per cent accuracy. As a test case, we discuss the XMM-Newton observation of GRB 090618 at z = 0.54. We are able to recover the correct redshift of this burst with the expected accuracy. © 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Bibliographic Details

D'Avanzo, P.; Bernardini, M. G.; Ghirlanda, G.; Ghisellini, G.; Campana, S.; Cusumano, G.; Vergani, S. D.; Tagliaferri, G.; Braito, V.; Melandri, A.; D'Elia, V.; Salvaterra, R.

Oxford University Press (OUP)

Physics and Astronomy; Earth and Planetary Sciences

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