The first gravitational-wave event from the merger of a binary neutron star system (GW170817) was detected recently. The associated short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) has a low isotropic luminosity (∼10⁴⁷ erg s⁻¹) and a peak energy E _p ∼ 145 keV during the initial main emission between −0.3 and 0.4 s. The origin of this short GRB is still under debate, but a plausible interpretation is that it is due to the off-axis emission from a structured jet. We consider two possibilities. First, since the best-fit spectral model for the main pulse of GRB 170817A is a cutoff power law with a hard low-energy photon index ( ), we consider an off-axis photosphere model. We develop a theory of photosphere emission in a structured jet and find that such a model can reproduce a low-energy photon index that is softer than a blackbody through enhancing high-latitude emission. The model can naturally account for the observed spectrum. The best-fit Lorentz factor along the line of sight is ∼20, which demands that there is a significant delay between the merger and jet launching. Alternatively, we consider that the emission is produced via synchrotron radiation in an optically thin region in an expanding jet with decreasing magnetic fields. This model does not require a delay of jet launching but demands a larger bulk Lorentz factor along the line of sight. We perform Markov Chain Monte Carlo fitting to the data within the framework of both models and obtain good fitting results in both cases.

Plateaus are common in X-ray afterglows of gamma-ray bursts. Among the few scenarios regarding their origin, the leading one is that there exists a magnetar inside and it persistently injects its spindown energy into an afterglow. In previous studies, the radiation efficiency of this process is assumed to be a constant at ≳0.1, which is quite simple and strong. In this work we obtain the efficiency from a physical point of view and find that this efficiency strongly depends on the injected luminosity. One implication of this result is that those X-ray afterglow light curves that show steeper temporal decay than t ⁻² after the plateau phase can be naturally understood now. Also, the braking indexes deduced from afterglow fitting are found to be larger than those in previous studies, which are more reasonable for newborn magnetars.

Star-forming and starburst galaxies are considered one of the viable candidate sources of the high-energy cosmic neutrino background detected in IceCube. We revisit contributions of supernova remnants (SNRs) and hypernova remnants (HNRs) in such galaxies to the diffuse high-energy neutrino and gamma-ray backgrounds, in light of the latest Fermi data above 50 GeV. We also take into account possible time-dependent effects of the cosmic-ray (CR) acceleration during the SNR evolution. CRs accelerated by the SNR shocks can produce high-energy neutrinos up to ∼100 TeV energies, but CRs from HNRs can extend the spectrum up to PeV energies. We show that, only if HNRs are dominant over SNRs, the diffuse neutrino background above 100 TeV can be explained without contradicting the gamma-ray data. However, the neutrino data around 30 TeV remain unexplained, which might suggest a different population of gamma-ray dark CR sources. We also consider possible contributions of Pop-III HNRs up to z ≲ 10 and show that they are not constrained by the gamma-ray data and thus could contribute to the diffuse high-energy backgrounds if their explosion energy reaches erg. More conservatively, our results suggest that the explosion energy of Pop-III HNRs is erg.