Evidence for mild deviation from power-law distribution of electrons in relativistic shocks: GRB 090902B

Abstract

Many previous studies have determined that the long lasting emission at X-ray, optical and radio wavelengths from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), called the afterglow, is likely produced by the external forward shock model. In this model, the GRB jet interacts with the circum-stellar medium and drives a shock that heats the medium, which radiates via synchrotron emission. In this work, we carried out a detailed analysis of the late time afterglow data of GRB 090902B using a very careful accounting of the Inverse Compton losses. We find that in the context of the external forward shock model, the only viable option to explain the X-ray and optical data of GRB 090920B is to have the electron energy distribution deviate from a power-law shape and exhibit some slight curvature immediately downstream of the shock front (we explored other models that rely on a single power-law assumption, but they all fail to explain the observations). We find the fraction of the energy of shocked plasma in magnetic field to be ~10-6 using late time afterglow data, which is consistent with the value obtained using early gamma-ray data. Studies like the present one might be able to provide a link between GRB afterglow modelling and numerical simulations of particle acceleration in collisionless shocks. We also provide detailed calculations for the early (≲ 103 s) high-energy (>100 MeV) emission and confirm that it is consistent with origin in the external forward shock. We investigated the possibility that the ~10 keV excess observed in the spectrum during the prompt phase also has its origin in the external shock and found the answer to be negative. © 2011 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS.