Universal scaling law in long gamma-ray bursts

Abstract

The overwhelming diversity of long gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs), discovered after the launch of the Swift satellite, is a major obstacle to LGRB studies. Recently, it was shown that the prompt emission of LGRBs can be classified into three subclasses: Type I and Type II LGRBs, populating separate fundamental planes in a 3D space defined by the peak luminosity, the duration, and the spectral peak energy, and outliers belonging to none of these planes. Here, we show that Type I LGRBs exhibit different shapes of light curves from that of Type II LGRBs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this classification has uncovered a new scaling law concerning the light curve of Type II LGRBs, over a span of 8 orders of magnitude ranging from the prompt emission to the late X-ray afterglow one. The scaled light curve has four distinct phases. The first phase has a characteristic time-scale, while the three subsequent phases exhibit power-law behaviors with different exponents. We attempt a new interpretation in terms of the emission from an optically thick fireball propagating in the cricumstellar matter at relativistic speed, and argue that the four observed phases correspond to its hydrodynamical phases. Our classification scheme succeeds in pinning down intrinsic luminosities of Type II LGRBs through the scaling law with a sample of polymorphic GRBs. Further refinements of this scheme and scaling law will make it possible to use a subclass of LGRBs as new standard candles with the same reliability and accuracy as Type Ia supernovae in more distant universe than the light from supernovae can reach. © 2013. Astronomical Society of Japan.