In the past few years, observations spearheaded and enabled by Swift have seen a re-writing of the story of gamma-ray burst (GRB) progenitors. It is now apparent that the observational dichotomy between long- and short-GRBs does not map cleanly to two distinct progenitor channels -- massive stars and merging compact objects. Instead, growing evidence suggests that a small minority of...
In the decades following the discovery of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in the 1960s, an understanding emerged that there are two classes of progenitor. The short duration (<2s) bursts arise from binary neutron star mergers (confirmed by the coincident LIGO/VIRGO gravitational wave detection of GRB170817A), and the long bursts (>2s) arise from the core-collapse of massive stars. However, the recent...
GRB 191019A was a long Gamma-ray burst (GRB) that triggered Swift/BAT and lasted about 65 s and, as such, originally thought to have a core-collapse origin. However, no associated supernova was detected following the optical afterglow despite deep follow-up, which suggested that the burst was caused by the merger of two compact stellar objects. This is also supported by the published...
In the context of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) astrophysics, the class of short GRBs is particularly fascinating since they are expected to be produced in compact binary mergers, and to be associated with gravitational wave (GW) events. Double neutron star or neutron star-black hole binaries likely generate another electromagnetic transient, known as Kilonova (KN). As such, with the present and...
