Exploring the GRB population: Robust afterglow modelling

Understand

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are ultra-relativistic collimated outflows, which emit synchrotron radiation throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum when they interact with their environment.

• This afterglow emission enables us to probe the dynamics of relativistic blast waves, the microphysics of shock acceleration, and environments of GRBs.
• We perform Bayesian inference on a sample of GRB afterglow data sets consisting of 22 long GRBs and 4 short GRBs, using the afterglow model "scalefit", which is based on 2D relativistic hydrodynamic simulations.
• We make use of Gaussian processes to account for systematic deviations in the data sets, which allows us to obtain robust estimates for the model parameters.