* Astronomy

Title: GRB 131014A: a Laboratory to Study the Thermal-Like and Non-Thermal Emissions in Gamma-Ray Bursts, and the new L_i^{nTh}-E_{peak,i}^{rest,nTh} relation
Author: S. Guiriec (1, 2 and 3), R. Mochkovitch, T. Piran, F. Daigne, C. Kouveliotou, J. Racusin, N. Gehrels, J. McEnery ((1) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, (2) University of Maryland College Park, and (3) Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology)

Evidence has been accumulated on the existence of a thermal-like component during the prompt phase of GRBs. This component, often associated with the GRB jet's photosphere, is usually subdominant compared to a much stronger non-thermal one. The prompt emission of Fermi GRB 131014A provides a unique opportunity to study this thermal-like component. Indeed, the thermal emission in GRB 131014A is much more intense than in other GRBs and a pure thermal episode is observed during the initial 0.16 s. The thermal-like component cools monotonically during the first second while the non-thermal emission kicks off. The intensity of the non-thermal component progressively increases until being energetically dominant at late time. This is a perfect scenario to disentangle the thermal component from the non-thermal one. A low-energy spectral index of +0.6 better fit the thermal component than the typical index value +1 corresponding to a pure Planck function. The non-thermal component is adequately fitted with a Band function whose low and high energy power law indices are ~-0.7 and <~-3, respectively; this is also statistically equivalent to a cutoff power law with a ~-0.7 index. This is in agreement with our previous results. Finally, a strong correlation is observed between the time-resolved luminosity of the non-thermal component, L_i^{nTh}, and its corresponding rest frame spectral peak energy, E_{peak,i}^{rest,nTh}, with a slope similar to the one reported in our previous articles. Assuming this relation to be universal for all GRBs we estimate a redshift of ~1.55 for GRB 131014A that is a typical value for long GRBs. These observational results are consistent with the models in which the non-thermal emission is produced well above the GRB jet photosphere but they may also be compatible with other scenarios (e.g., dissipative photosphere) that are not discussed in this article.

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