GRB 990123: The Case for Saturated Comptonization

Liang, E. P., Crider, A., Bottcher, M., and Smith, I. A.

We find that the optical magnitudes of GRB990123 observed by ROTSE move in-tandem with the magnitudes extrapolated from the simultaneous BATSE spectra, strongly suggesting that the optical, X-ray and gamma-ray photons originate from a single source. We show that the broadband optical-gamma-ray spectra can be naturally modeled by the saturated Comptonization model and derive the parameters of the Compton emitting shell from first principles.

Status: 1999, ApJ, 519, L21

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