afterglowpy

Numeric GRB Afterglow models

A Python 3 module to calculate GRB afterglow light curves and spectra. Details of the methods can be found in Ryan et al 2020 and Ryan et al 2024. Builds on van Eerten & MacFadyen 2010 and van Eerten 2018. This code is under active development.

Documentation available at https://afterglowpy.readthedocs.io/

Attribution

If you use this code in a publication, please refer to the package by name and cite "Ryan, G., van Eerten, H., Piro, L. and Troja, E., Astrophysical Journal 896, 166 (2020)" ADS link. Upgrades including centroid motion, size, and the deep Newtonian phase are presented in "Ryan, G., van Eerten, H., Troja, E., Piro, L., O'Connor, B., and Ricci, R., Astrophysical Journal 975, 131 (2024)" ADS link.

Acknowledgements

This work is funded in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under the AHEAD2020 project (grant agreement n. 871158).

Features

afterglowpy computes synchrotron emission from the forward shock of a relativistic blast wave. It includes:

• Fully trans-relativistic shock evolution through a constant density medium.
• On-the-fly integration over the equal-observer-time slices of the shock surface.
• Approximate prescription for jet spreading.
• Arbitrary viewing angles.
• Angularly structured jets, ie. E(θ)
• Spherical velocity-stratified outflows, ie. E(u)
• Counter-jet emission.
• Deep Newtonian emission.
• Image moments suitable for astrometry: centroid position and image size.

It has limited support (these should be considered experimental) for:

• Initial energy injection
• Inverse comption spectra
• Early coasting phase

It does not include (yet):

• External wind medium, ie. n ∝ r^-2
• Synchrotron self-absorbtion
• Reverse shock emission

afterglowpy has been calibrated to the BoxFit code (van Eerten, van der Horst, & Macfadyen 2011, available at the Afterglow Library) and produces similar light curves for top hat jets (within 50% when same parameters are used) both on- and off-axis. Its jet models by default do not include an initial coasting phase, which may effect predictions for early observations.

Changelog

New in v0.8.1

• Numpy 2.0 compatibility
• ignoreBounds Boolean keyword argument to ignore built-in bounds checking on parameters.

New in v0.8.0

• Image size and position via the moment keyword.
• Deep Newtonian spectral evolution at late times via specType=grb.jet.DeepNewtonian

Installation/Building

afterglowpy is available via pip:

$ pip install afterglowpy

afterglowpy is compatible with Numpy v1 and v2, Python 3.8+, and runs on MacOS, Linux, and Windows.

If you are working on a local copy of this repo and would like to install from source, you can the run the following from the top level directory of the project.

$ pip install -e .

Using

In your python code, import the library with import afterglowpy as grb.

The main function of interest isgrb.fluxDensity(t, nu, **kwargs). See examples/plotLightCurve.py for a simple example.

For jet-like afterglows there are up to 13 required keyword arguments:

• jetType an integer code setting the jet structure. It can be grb.jet.TopHat, grb.jet.Gaussian, grb.jet.PowerLawCore, grb.jet.GaussianCore, grb.jet.Spherical, or grb.jet.PowerLaw.
• specType an integer code specifying flags for the emissivity function and spectrum. Can be grb.jet.SimpleSpec (basic spectrum with ν_m and ν_c), grb.jet.DeepNewtonian, grb.jet.EpsEBar to interpret epsilon_e as ε̅_e = ε_e(p-2)/(p-1), grb.jet.ICCooling (simple inverse Compton effects on the cooling frequency, experimental). Multiple options can be combined with the | operator.
• thetaObs viewing angle in radians
• E0 on-axis isotropic equivalent energy in erg
• thetaCore half-width of the jet core in radians (jetType specific)
• thetaWing "wing" truncation angle of the jet, in radians
• b power for power-law structure, θ^-b
• n0 Number density of ISM, in cm^-3
• p Electron distribution power-law index (p>2)
• epsilon_e Thermal energy fraction in electrons
• epsilon_B Thermal energy fraction in magnetic field
• xi_N Fraction of electrons that get accelerated
• d_L Luminosity distance in cm

Optional keyword arguments for all models are:

• z redshift (defaults to 0)
• spread boolean (defaults to True), whether to allow the jet to spread.
• counterjet boolean (defaults to False), whether to include the counterjet
• moment array (integer dtype, same shape as t and nu) which sky moment to compute.
• ignoreBounds boolean (defaults to False), whether to ignore the built in paramter bounds checking.
• L0 Fiducial luminosity for energy injection, in erg/s, default 0.0.
• q Temporal power-law index for energy injection, default 0.0.
• ts Fiducial time-scale for energy injection, in seconds, default 0.
• tRes time resolution of shock-evolution scheme, number of sample points per decade in time
• latRes latitudinal resolution for structured jets, number of shells per thetaC
• rtol target relative tolerance of flux integration