Swift and XMM-Newton observations of the extraordinary gamma-ray burst 060729:: More than 125 days of x-ray afterglow

We report the results of the Swift and XMM-Newton observations of the Swift-discovered GRB 060729 (T-90 = 115 s). The afterglow of this burst was exceptionally bright in X-rays as well as at UV/optical wavelengths, showing an unusually long slow decay phase (alpha = 0.14 +/- 0.02), suggesting a larger energy injection phase at early times than in other bursts. The X-ray light curve displays a break at about 60 ks after the burst. The X-ray decay slope after the break is alpha = 1.29 +/- 0.03. Up to 125 days after the burst we do not detect a jet break, suggesting that the jet opening angle is larger than 28 degrees. We find that the X-ray spectra of the early phase change dramatically and can all be fitted by an absorbed single-power-law models or alternatively by a blackbody plus power-law model. The power-law fits show that the X-ray spectrum becomes steeper while the absorption column density decreases. In the blackbody model the temperature decreases from kT = 0.6 to 0.1 keV between 85 and 160 s after the burst in the rest frame. The afterglow was clearly detected up to 9 days after the burst in all six UVOT filters and in UVW1 even for 31 days. A break at about 50 ks is clearly detected in all six UVOT filters from a shallow decay slope of about 0.3 and a steeper decay slope of 1.3. The XMM-Newton observations started about 12 hr after the burst and show a typical afterglow X-ray spectrum with beta(X) = 1.1 and absorption column density of 1 X 10(21) cm(-2).