AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 75 Early Results from Swift: The Gamma Ray Burst Bonanza
Poster, Tuesday, 9:20am-6:30pm, January 10, 2006, Exhibit Hall

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[75.06] X-Ray Flash Observations by Swift

D. Hullinger (GSFC/UMCP/BYU-I), J.-L. Atteia (Observatoire Midi-Pyren'ee's), L. Barbier, S. Barthelmy (GSFC), J. Cummings (GSFC/NRC), E. Fenimore (LANL), N. Gehrels (GSFC), N. Kawai (Tokyo Institute of Technology), H. Krimm (GSFC/USRA), D. Lamb (U. of Chicago), C. Markwardt (GSFC/UMD), D. Morris (PSU), D. Palmer (LANL), A. Parsons (GSFC), G. Ricker (MIT), T. Sakamoto (GSFC/NRC), G. Sato (ISAS), J. Tueller (GSFC)

In recent years, BeppoSAX, HETE-2, and other missions have shown that so-called ``x-ray flashes'' resemble gamma-ray bursts in almost every way, except that their \nuF\nu peak energy lies below 30 keV. This indicates that x-ray flashes and gamma-ray bursts are either closely related phenomena or that they are the same phenomena viewed from different angles. In the latter case, relativistic beaming could account for the lower peak energy and would result in a rise in the initial phase of the GRB afterglow. Swift has the ability to observe the x-ray afterglows associated with x-ray flashes within seconds of the XRF detection. This early observation is a key to providing new insights into the origins of x-ray flashes and their distinctions from gamma-ray bursts. In this poster, we describe the x-ray flash observations made by Swift and discuss the implications of those observations.


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