Astrophysics Seminar
Localisation of Gamma Ray Burst using AstroSat Mass Model
Speaker: Divita Saraogi (IIT Bombay)
The Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI) on AstroSat has proven a highly effective tool for detecting Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). In addition to detecting hundreds of GRBs jointly with other missions, CZTI has also detected over 80 bursts that were not detected by any other mission. However, CZTI was not designed as a GRB instrument, and lacks direct localisation abilities.This limit further analysis of these bursts, and also precludes any attempts to follow-up the sources using other telescopes and instruments. This proves to be a severe handicap in the highly active field of time-domain astrophysics. We demonstrate the localisation of GRBs with CZTI by utilizing the “shadows” cast on the CZTI detector plane by the other satellite components and instruments, and comparing the observations with extensive simulations done using the AstroSat Mass Model. We test the accuracy of our methods by re-computing the positions of well-localized GRBs with CZTI data, and comparing against their precise observed locations. We then expand the work to localize other bursts for which precise position information is not available from other missions.