[Seminar:] GRB 211211A and the Emerging Diversity of Merger-driven Gamma-ray Bursts

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• Benjamin Gompertz, University of Birmingham
• Wednesday 12 October 2022, 14:00-15:00
• Physics West Lecture Theatre 117.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Nathan Steinle.

Gamma-ray bursts are explosive transient events associated with either the core-collapse of massive stars (long GRBs) or the mergers of compact objects like neutron stars and black holes (short GRBs). For 30 years, they’ve been divided into two broad classes based primarily on duration, with short GRBs lasting two seconds or less and long GRBs lasting tens, hundreds or even thousands of seconds. Although it’s long been suspected that this classification scheme is imperfect, its limitations were dramatically spotlighted in late 2021 with the discovery of GRB 211211A , which lasted almost a minute in Swift-BAT observations but showed clear signs of a merger origin in the form of a kilonova – the radioactive signature of heavy element nucleogenesis following a compact object merger. In this talk I will highlight the remarkable properties of GRB 211211A , its connection to short GRBs, and its implications for future (and archival) searches for compact binary mergers.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Talks Series series.

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• Astrophysics Talks Series
• Bham Talks
• Physics West Lecture Theatre 117
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