Gamma-ray bursts are one of the most energetic explosions in the universe.
When a gamma-ray bursts occurs, it is often the brightest source in the entire gamma-ray sky.
Due to the extreme brightness, gamma-ray bursts are detected in a wide range of distance, from our local universe to the early universe. In fact, gamma-ray bursts are one of the very few events that can be seen directly out to the era when the first star was expected to form. Gamma-ray bursts are thus powerful tools to study the environment of the early universe, and how the universe has evolved to its current stage.
Gamma-ray bursts were first discovered in the 1960s. Since then, our knowledge of these events has greatly advanced thanks to previous studies of both theoretical modelling and space and ground observations. Nowadays, gamma-ray bursts are usually classified into two groups, short and long, based on their burst durations, with the separation of about two seconds. Both the theoretical and observational evidences suggest that long gamma-ray bursts are originated from the collapse of massive stars, and thus are related to supernovae, while the short gamma-ray bursts are from the mergers of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole, and therefore also produce gravitational waves.
Although gamma-ray bursts was originally detected in the gamma-ray wavelength, now we know that the emission actually spans a wide range of spectrum. While the gamma-ray emission usually only lasts for a few seconds to a few minutes, emission in the lower energy range (x-rays, UV, optical, and radio) can last for a much longer time (from days to years). In addition, gamma-ray bursts are known sources of gravitational waves, and potential sources of neutrinos and cosmic rays. Therefore, to gather a complet set of gamma-ray burst data requires covering not only photons from the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but also nutrinos, cosmic rays, and gravitational waves (the so-called "multi-messenger astronomy").
To advance our knowledge of gamma-ray bursts, espeicially the prompt observations in the x-rays, UV, and optical wavelengths, NASA launched the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in Nov. 20, 2004. The mission is often referred to as Swift and has an international partnership from the United States, United Kindom, and Italy. Swift has three instruments onboard: the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) that detect gamma-ray bursts in the gamma-ray/hard x-ray range (15-350 keV), the X-Ray Telescopes (XRT) that collects photons in the soft x-ray range (0.2-10 keV), and the UV/Optical Telescope (UVOT) that observes in the UV and optical wavelengths (170-650 nm).
The main instrument that I work with is The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) onboard Swift. BAT can see a large portion (~1/6) of the sky of the sky at any time, and is responsible for finding gamma-ray bursts. For the past ~ 15 years, BAT has detected more than 1300 Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs), of which about 1/3 of GRBs have distance measurements from the ground observatories, ranging from our local universe to the early universe when the first star was expected to form. We present the analyses of the BAT-detected GRBs in the third Swift/BAT GRB catalog. The result summaries and data products are available at the public website: The Swift/BAT GRB Catalog, which is continued to be updated with recent bursts.
As the first gravitational waves signal was detected in 2015 by the the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a new window has been opened for physicists and astronomers to understand the universe. In addition, the first short gamma-ray bursts (GRB170817A) associated with gravitational waves detection (GW170817) was found in Aug. 17, 2017 by the Fermi gamma-ray telescope, confirming the long-lasting hypothesis that (at least some) short gamma-ray bursts are indeed originated from merging of two neutron stars.
Swift actively participates in the counterpart search for gravitational waves detections. My work focuses on searching for counterparts in the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) onboard Swift. For each gravitational waves detection, we search for potential astrophysical events in the BAT data around the LIGO/VIRGO detection time. Our search results are publicaly available on the the BAT gravitational waves summary page and also shared with the astronomy community through email notices via the Gamma-ray Coordinates Network (GCN).
For the GRB170817A/GW170817 event, Swift was behind the Earth at the detection time and thus BAT could not see the event. However, XRT and UVOT participate in the followup observations and UVOT clearly detected the associated kilonova signal in the UV and optical wavelengths (Evans et al. 2017).
Due to the extreme luminosities of gamma-ray bursts, they are one of the very few astrophysical events that can be detected directly out to the early universe. Therefore, long gamma-ray bursts provide important insight of star-formation history in the early universe. Several studies (e.g., XXX) suggest that the long gamma-ray burst rate implies a higher star-formation rate in the early universe than the rate measured from galaxy observations. However, the gamma-ray burst rate is rather uncertain. One of the main reasons come from the complex detection method adopted by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (a.k.a Swift, the main gamma-ray burst observatory for gamma-ray bursts with distant measurements). We perform careful simulation of the Swift detection algorithm, in order to accurately converting the observing rate to the intrinsic rate and provide tighter constraint of the gamma-ray burst rate and star-formation history.