Stars, Interstellar Medium and the Galaxy Commons^™

Constraining The Progenitor And Central Engine Of Gamma-Ray Bursts With Observational Data, Lu Houjun

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are extremely energetic explosions at cosmological distances. We have made great progress in understanding the mysteries of these events since they were discovered more than forty years ago. However, some open questions still remain, e.g. how many classes of GRBs are there, what are the progenitors of these classes, and what is the central engine powering these huge explosions? Thanks to the NASA missions Swift and Fermi, which are used to detect the multi-wavelength emission from these transients, our understanding of GRBs has been greatly advanced. In this dissertation, I use multi-wavelength data to constrain the progenitor …