Most of my recent work focuses on topics related to gamma-ray bursts. Here are some brief description about the gamma-ray burst study that I am involved in.
Gamma-ray bursts are one of the most energetic explosions in the universe. When a gamma-ray burst occurs, it is often the brightest source in the entire gamma-ray sky. Due to the extreme brightness, gamma-ray bursts are detected in a wide range of distance, from our local universe to the early universe. In fact, gamma-ray bursts are one of the very few events that can be seen directly out to the era when the first star was expected to form. Gamma-ray bursts are thus powerful tools to study the environment in the early universe, and how the universe has evolved to its current stage.
Gamma-ray bursts were first discovered in the 1960s. Since then, our knowledge of these events has greatly advanced thanks to previous studies of both theoretical modelling and space and ground observations. Nowadays, gamma-ray bursts are usually classified into two groups, short and long, based on their burst durations, with the separation of about two seconds. Both the theoretical and observational evidences suggest that long gamma-ray bursts are originated from the collapse of massive stars, and thus are related to supernovae, while the short gamma-ray bursts are from the mergers of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole, and therefore also produce gravitational waves.
Although gamma-ray bursts was originally detected in the gamma-ray wavelength, now we know that the emission actually spans a wide range of spectrum. While the gamma-ray emission usually only lasts for a few seconds to a few minutes, emission in the lower energy range (x-rays, UV, optical, and radio) can last for a much longer time (from days to years). In addition, gamma-ray bursts are known sources of gravitational waves, and potential sources of neutrinos and cosmic rays. Therefore, to gather a complete set of gamma-ray burst data requires covering not only photons from the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but also nutrinos, cosmic rays, and gravitational waves (the so-called "multi-messenger astronomy").
Since 2015, Swift has been actively participated in the counterpart search and followup observations for gravitational waves detections. For the GRB170817A/GW170817 event, Swift was behind the Earth at the detection time and thus BAT could not see the event. However, XRT and UVOT participate in the followup observations and UVOT clearly detected the associated kilonova signal in the UV and optical wavelengths (Evans et al. 2017).
My work focuses on searching for counterparts in the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) onboard Swift. For each gravitational waves detection, we search for potential astrophysical events in the BAT data around the LIGO/VIRGO detection time. Our search results are publicaly available on the the BAT gravitational waves summary page and also shared with the astronomy community through email notices via the Gamma-ray Coordinates Network (GCN).