Comparison of distance measurements to dust clouds using GRB X-ray haloes and 3D dust extinction

Šiljeg, Barbara; Bošnjak, Željka; Jelić, Vibor; Tiengo, A; Pintore, F; Bracco, Andrea (2023) Comparison of distance measurements to dust clouds using GRB X-ray haloes and 3D dust extinction. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 526 (2). pp. 2605-2619. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

X-ray photons from energetic sources such as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can be scattered on dust clouds in the Milky Way, creating a time-evolving halo around the GRB position. X-ray observations of such haloes allow the measurement of dust cloud distances in the Galaxy on which the scattering occurs. We present the first systematic comparison of the distances to scattering regions derived from GRB haloes with the 3D dust distribution derived from recently published optical-to-near infrared extinction maps. GRB haloes were observed around seven sources by the Swift XRT and the XMM-Newton EPIC instruments, namely GRB 031203, GRB 050713A, GRB 050724, GRB 061019, GRB 070129, GRB 160623A, and GRB 221009A. We used four 3D extinction maps that exploit photometric data from different surveys and apply diverse algorithms for the 3D mapping of extinction, and compared the X-ray halo-derived distances with the local maxima in the 3D extinction density distribution. We found that in all GRBs, we can find at least one local maximum in the 3D dust extinction map that is in agreement with the dust distance measured from X-ray rings. For GRBs with multiple X-ray rings, the dust distance measurements coincide with at least three maxima in the extinction map for GRB 160623A, and five maxima for GRB 221009A. The agreement of these independent distance measurements shows that the methods used to create dust extinction maps may potentially be optimized by the X-ray halo observations from GRBs.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	dust; extinction; X-rays: ISM; gamma-ray bursts; Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies
Subjects:	NATURAL SCIENCES > Physics > Astronomy and Astrophysics
Divisions:	Division of Experimental Physics
Projects:	Project title Project leader Project code Project type Razumijevanje zračenja na niskim radio frekvencijama: ususret novoj generaciji radio teleskopa-LowFreqCRO Vibor Jelić; Vernesa Smolčić; Željka Marija Bošnjak; Bruno Šlaus IP-2018-01-2889 HRZZ
Depositing User:	Vibor Jelić
Date Deposited:	07 Feb 2024 11:44
URI:	http://fulir.irb.hr/id/eprint/8531
DOI:	10.1093/mnras/stad2946

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