Published in

Oxford University Press, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1(507), p. 1047-1054, 2021

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab2186

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Constraining properties of GRB central engines with X-ray flares

Journal article published in 2021 by Shuang-Xi Yi ORCID, Wei Xie, Shuai-Bing Ma, Wei-Hua Lei ORCID, Mei Du
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

ABSTRACT X-ray flares in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are believed to be generated by the late activities of central engine, and thus provide an useful tool to diagnose the properties of central objects. In this paper, we work on a GRB X-ray flare sample whose bulk Lorentz factors are constrained by two different methods and the jet opening angles are determined by the jet breaks in afterglow light curves. Considering a hyperaccreting stellar-mass black hole (BH) as the central engine of GRBs and the Blandford & Znajek process (BZ) as the jet production mechanism, we constrain the parameters of central engine by using the X-ray flare data. We find that the BZ mechanism is so powerful making it possible to interpret both GRB prompt emissions and bright X-ray flares. The wind parameter (p) and accreted mass (Md) fall into reasonable ranges. Our result is also applied to GRB 170817A. The late X-ray flare in GRB 170817A, if it is true, might not be a BH origin.