0000000000114018
AUTHOR
A. S. Fruchter
An eclipsing millisecond pulsar in the globular cluster Terzan 5
WE HAVE discovered an eclipsing binary millisecond pulsar in the globular cluster Terzan 5. This, the second known eclipsing binary pulsar after PSR1957 + 20, has a pulse period of 11.56 ms and a very short orbital period of 1.8 hours. In contrast to PSR1957 + 20, where the eclipses occupy about 10 per cent of the orbital period1, the eclipse duration in this pulsar is very variable and never less than one-third of the orbital period. The pulsar is in a circular orbit of radius 0.11 light seconds, which implies a minimum companion mass of 0.089 solar masses, about four times the companion mass of PSR1957 + 20. Timing observations suggest an identification of the pulsar with a variable conti…
GRB 030227: The first multiwavelength afterglow of an INTEGRAL GRB
We present multiwavelength observations of a gamma-ray burst detected by INTEGRAL (GRB 030227) between 5.3 hours and ~1.7 days after the event. Here we report the discovery of a dim optical afterglow (OA) that would not have been detected by many previous searches due to its faintess (R~23). This OA was seen to decline following a power law decay with index Alpha_R= -0.95 +/- 0.16. The spectral index Beta_opt/NIR yielded -1.25 +/- 0.14. These values may be explained by a relativistic expansion of a fireball (with p = 2.0) in the cooling regime. We also find evidence for inverse Compton scattering in X-rays.
A tale of two GRB-SNe at a common redshift of z=0.54
We present ground-based and HST optical observations of the optical transients (OTs) of long-duration Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) 060729 and 090618, both at a redshift of z = 0.54. For GRB 060729, bumps are seen in the optical light curves (LCs), and the late-time broadband spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the OT resemble those of local type Ic supernovae (SNe). For GRB 090618, the dense sampling of our optical observations has allowed us to detect well-defined bumps in the optical LCs, as well as a change in colour, that are indicative of light coming from a core-collapse SN. The accompanying SNe for both events are individually compared with SN1998bw, a known GRB-supernova, and SN1994I…