Extra-galactic high-energy transients: event rate densities and luminosity functions

Understand

Several types of extra-galactic high-energy transients have been discovered, which include high-luminosity and low-luminosity long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), short-duration GRBs, supernova shock breakouts (SBOs), and tidal disruption events (TDEs) without or with an associated relativistic jet.

• In this paper, we apply a unified method to systematically study the redshift-dependent event rate densities and the global luminosity functions (ignoring redshift evolution) of these transients.
• We introduce some empirical formulae for the redshift-dependent event rate densities for different types of transients, and derive the local specific event rate density, which also represents its global luminosity function.
• Long GRBs have a large enough sample to reveal features in the global luminosity function, which is best characterized as a triple power law.