Gamma-ray Bursts: 50 Years and Counting!

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts were discovered by the Vela satellites in the late 1960s, but they were announced for the first time exactly 50 years ago, in 1973. The history of our understanding of gamma-ray bursts can be subdivided into several eras. We will highlight the main discoveries about GRBs, as well as the path toward the future that each GRB era could still indicate.

A Very-High-Energy Gamma-Ray View of the Transient Sky

“…The science topics of GRBs and tidal disruption events (TDEs) are discussed in more details in dedicated papers within this Special Issue [4]. Nevertheless, we briefly touch upon them in the following subsections for the completeness of this review.…”

“…telescope up to a few TeV for three consecutive nights while the recent detection of GRB 221009A by the LHAASO experiment up to 13 TeV [194] has definitively proven that instruments operating in the energy range above few TeV band such as the ASTRI Mini-Array [195], although not specifically designed for transients and time-domain astrophysics, may also play a key role in the future follow-up programs of these events [196,197]. For more detailed review on GRBs, see [4,198].…”

“…We review the state of the art in the detection and search for emission of transient events in the GeV-TeV regime for different types of astrophysical sources in Sections 2-8, namely novae (Section 2), microquasars, and flaring gamma-ray binaries (Section 3), supernovae (Section 4), pulsar-wind nebulae (Section 5), fast radio bursts and magnetars (Section 6), and gravitational waves (Section 7). We then briefly mention other transient sources in Section 8, such as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and tidal disruption events (TDEs), which are more extensively covered in a dedicated review of this Special Issue [4]. We finally discuss the latest advances and future perspectives in Section 9.…”

Scientific Highlights of the AGILE Gamma-ray Mission

“…The AGILE data suggest a dramatic transition between prompt and afterglow emission with a peculiar phase of coexistence of MeV and GeV emissions with very different spectral properties. A general review on the main discoveries about GRB science can be found in [134].…”

Future Perspectives for Gamma-ray Burst Detection from Space

“…A number of experiments were quickly developed and launched into space, mainly by the Soviet Union and the United States, to boost the detection of similar events and understand their true nature. The inevitable requirement of space-based instrumentation to catch the unpredictable short and bright flash of high-energy radiation from these events largely contributed to boosting the international race in the development of cutting-edge technological detectors with exponentially increasing sensitivity, as well as the provision of more and more advanced platforms to ensure their most proficient operations (see, e.g., [2] for recent historical reviews on GRBs).…”