DISCOVERY OF A TIGHT CORRELATION FOR GAMMA-RAY BURST AFTERGLOWS WITH CANONICAL LIGHT CURVES

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) observed up to redshifts z > 8 are fascinating objects to study due to their still unexplained relativistic outburst mechanisms and their possible use to test cosmological models. Our analysis of 77 GRB afterglows with known redshifts revealed a physical subsample of long GRBs with the canonical plateau breaking to power-law light curves with a significant luminosity L-X*-break time T-a* correlation in the GRB rest frame. This subsample forms approximately the upper envelope of the studied distribution. We have also found a similar relation for a small sample of GRB afterglows that belong to the intermediate class between the short and the long ones. It proves that within the full sample of afterglows there exist physical subclasses revealed here by tight correlations of their afterglow properties. The afterglows with regular (canonical) light curves obey not only the mentioned tight physical scaling, but-for a given T-a*-the more regular progenitor explosions lead to preferentially brighter afterglows.