Local absorption of high-energy emission from gamma-ray bursts

Abstract

High-energy photons emitted from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are subject to pair-production interactions with lower energy photons, leading to an effective optical depth. In this paper, we estimate the opacity resulting from photon fields located at various distances from long GRB sites: those of the binary companion to the massive stellar progenitor, the star-forming molecular cloud containing the GRB, and the total photon field of the host galaxy. The first two photon fields are found to be transparent for most reasonable sets of assumptions about these systems. In the case of galactic radiation fields, we have performed several numerical simulations to calculate the expected opacities for two different line-of-sight geometries through the host galaxy and include a full accounting of the infrared radiation produced by the absorption and re-radiation of starlight by dust. The optical depth for GeV gamma rays due to direct starlight is less than unity for all host galaxies. At higher energies, >10 TeV, a spectral cutoff can occur due to the rapidly increasing number of mid- to far-IR intragalactic photons re-radiated by dust. Photons in the extragalactic background light therefore remain the only relevant source of photon-photon opacity for ongoing GRB observations with Fermi-LAT and potential future detections with ground-based gamma-ray telescopes. © 2010. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.