A leptonic-hadronic model for the afterglow of gamma-ray burst 090510

Abstract

We model multiwavelength afterglow data from the short Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) 090510 using a combined leptonic-hadronic model of synchrotron radiation from an adiabatic blast wave. High energy, >100 MeV, emission in our model is dominated by proton-synchrotron radiation, while electron-synchrotron radiation dominates in the X ray and ultraviolet wavelengths. The collimation-corrected GRB energy, depending on the jet-break time, in this model could be as low as 3e51 erg but two orders of magnitude larger than the gamma-ray energy. We also calculated the opacities for electron-positron pair production by gamma rays and found that TeV gamma rays from proton-synchrotron radiation can escape the blast wave at early time, and their detection can provide evidence of a hadronic emission component dominating at high energies.

Accepted for publication in ApJ Lett. 5 pages, 2 figures, minor changes, added references