Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Monster In The Dark: The Ultraluminous Grb 080607 And Its Dusty Environment, Dieter H. Hartmann, D. A. Perley, A. N. Morgan, A. Updike, F. Yuan, C. W. Awkerlof, A. A. Miller, J. S. Bloom, S. B. Cenko, W. Li

Publications

We present early-time optical through infrared photometry of the bright gamma-ray burst GRB 080607, starting only 6 s following the initial trigger in the rest frame. Complemented by our previously published spectroscopy, this high-quality photometric dataset allows us to solve for the extinction properties of the redshift 3.036 sightline, giving perhaps the most detailed information on the ultraviolet continuum absorption properties of any sightline outside our Local Group to date. The extinction properties are not adequately modeled by any ordinary extinction template (including the average Milky Way, Large Magellanic Cloud, and Small Magellanic Cloud curves), partially because the 2175 A …