The Swift era

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511980336.006

5 - The Swift era

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012

Neil Gehrels and

David N. Burrows

Edited by

Chryssa Kouveliotou,

Ralph A. M. J. Wijers and

Stan Woosley

Show author details

Neil Gehrels: Affiliation:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
David N. Burrows: Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University, 525 Davey Lab, University Park, PA 16802, USA
Chryssa Kouveliotou: Affiliation:
NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville
Ralph A. M. J. Wijers: Affiliation:
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Stan Woosley: Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz

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Summary

Introduction

The study of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remains highly dependent on the capabilities of the observatories that carry out the measurements. The large detector size of BATSE produced an impressively large sample of GRBs for duration and sky distribution studies. The burst localization and repointing capabilities of BeppoSAX led to breakthroughs in host and progenitor understanding. The next phase in our understanding of GRBs is being provided by the Swift mission. In this chapter we discuss the capabilities and findings of the Swift mission and their relevance to our understanding of GRBs. We also examine what is being learned about star formation, supernovae, and the early Universe from the new results. In each section of the chapter, we close with a discussion of the new questions and issues raised by the Swift findings.

The Swift observatory

Swift (Gehrels et al. 2004) carries three instruments: a wide-field Burst Alert Telescope (BAT; Barthelmy et al. 2005a) that detects GRBs and positions them to arcminute accuracy, a narrow-field X-Ray Telescope (XRT; Burrows et al. 2005a) and a UV–Optical Telescope (UVOT; Roming et al. 2005) that observe their afterglows and determine positions to arcsecond accuracy, all within about 2 minutes. BAT is a coded aperture hard X-ray (15–350 keV) imager with 0.5 m2 of CdZnTe detectors (32 000 individual sensors; ~2400 cm2 effective area at 20 keV including mask occultation) and a 1.4 sr half-coded field of view.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Gamma-ray Bursts , pp. 73 - 90
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511980336.006 [Opens in a new window]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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