Reverse shock emission and ionization breakout powered by post-merger millisecond magnetars

Abstract

There is accumulating evidence that at least a fraction of binary neutron star (BNS) mergers result in rapidly spinning magnetars, with subrelativistic neutron-rich ejecta as massive as a small fraction of a solar mass. The ejecta could be heated continuously by the Poynting flux emanated from the central magnetars. Such a Poynting flux could become lepton dominated so that a reverse shock develops. It was demonstrated that such a picture is capable of accounting for the optical transient PTF11agg. In this paper we investigate the X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) radiation, as well as the optical and radio radiation studied by Wang & Dai. UV emission is particularly important because it has the right energy to ionize the hot ejecta at times t ≲ 600 s. It is thought that the ejecta of BNS mergers are a remarkably pure sample of r-process material, about which our understanding is still incomplete. In this paper we evaluate the possibility of observationally determining the bound-bound and bound-free opacities of the r-process material by timing the X-ray, UV, and optical radiation. It is found that these timings depend on the opacities weakly, and therefore only loose constraints on the opacities can be obtained.