I will overview central engine models for gamma-ray burst jets and their connection to the creation of heavy element nucleosynthesis. Particular emphasis will be placed on the recent discovery of long GRBs with kilonova emission and how this discovery constrains the origin of jets from neutron star mergers. Time permitting, I will address possible connections between GRBs and other...
Radio observations employing the very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) technique offer a crucial insight into the structure and dynamics of Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) jets. Specifically, VLBI serves as a fundamental tool for measuring the apparent superluminal expansion (in on-axis GRBs) and proper motion (in off-axis GRBs) of the GRB blast wave. These measurements enable constraints on the...
GRB 221009A has been dubbed the BOAT or brightest of all time for its recording-breaking gamma-ray brightness. At radio frequencies, it also holds the record as the brightest counterpart detected to date. In this talk, I will present a summary of the observations conducted by my collaborators and I (Bright & Rhodes et al 2023, Rhodes et al 2024), resulting in the most comprehensive radio...
Since the launch of Swift, it has detected more than 1500 GRBs, ~90% of which are long duration GRBs. Almost every spectroscopically confirmed SN associated with a long GRB has been hydrogen and helium poor with broad lines (Ic-BL), indicating a stripped massive star progenitor with fast winds that produced a highly-collimated jet viewed on-axis. A critical prediction of this progenitor model...
Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are believed to originate from core collapse of massive stars. High-redshift GRBs can probe the star formation and reionization history of the early universe, but their detection remains rare. Here we report the detection of a GRB triggered in the 0.5–4 keV band by the Wide-field X-ray Telescope (WXT) on board the Einstein Probe (EP) mission, designated as...
Ever since the early years in the Swift mission, it has been clear that the low-end of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) luminosity distribution has yet to be unveiled, holding the key to the intrinsic rate of GRBs and possibly to their jet structure. Yet, some of the trickiest riddles that GRB astronomy posed to us in the last few years came at the opposite end of the luminosity distribution, where...
There have been hundreds of optical afterglows detected through follow-up observations of well-localized long gamma-ray burst (LGRB) triggers, many made possible by Swift's X-ray Telescope's precise localization capabilities. The advent of state-of-the art time-domain surveys including the Zwicky Transient Facility have also enabled the serendipitous discovery of optical afterglows without an...
For the analysis of broadband radio-through-x-ray GRB afterglows, the x-ray observations made via the Niel Gehrels Swift X-ray Telescope (XRT) are a crucial tool. As the x-ray afterglow emission is not typically contaminated by any thermal counterpart (optical and infrared), nor affected by scintillation or self-absorption that can complicate the picture at radio, the post-burst x-ray emission...
Recent observations of peculiar gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), such as GRB 211211A and GRB 230307A, challenge the traditional view that hyper-accreting black holes power these events. Instead, key signatures—temporal, spectral, and kilonova features—suggest millisecond magnetars as central engines, formed in compact star mergers. This talk highlights recent progress in understanding magnetar-driven...
