Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era

Understand

With its rapid-response capability and multiwavelength complement of instruments, the Swift satellite has transformed our physical understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).

• Providing high-quality observations of hundreds of bursts, and facilitating a wide range of follow-up observations within seconds of each event, Swift has revealed an unforeseen richness in observed burst properties, shed light on the nature of short-duration bursts, and helped realize the promise of GRBs as probes of the processes and environments of star formation out to the earliest cosmic epochs.
• These advances have opened new perspectives on the nature and properties of burst central engines, interactions with the burst environment from microparsec to gigaparsec scales, and the possibilities for non-photonic signatures.
• Our understanding of these extreme cosmic sources has thus advanced substantially; yet more than 40 years after their discovery, GRBs continue to present major challenges on both observational and theoretical fronts.