PROMPT Phase II: Gamma-Ray Bursts as Probes

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Proposal: AST-0440793Principal Investigator: Daniel ReichartInstitution: University of North Carolina Chapel HillTitle: PROMPT Phase II: Gamma-Ray Bursts as ProbesABSTRACT:PROMPT is an instrument acquisition program that will enable the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to probe the physics, environments, and diversity of gamma-ray bursts and use them to probe the early universe in new and powerful ways. At the same time, PROMPT will be a shared resource between University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and every undergraduate institution in the state of North Carolina with an astronomer or with an interest in astronomy, including historically African-American and Native-American institutions, as well as the astronomy community as a whole.INTELLECTUAL MERIT: Observations of gamma ray bursts and their environments over the past seven years now strongly indicate that at least the long-duration/soft-spectrum GRBs are the death cries of massive stars and the birth cries of black holes. Redshifts have been measured for over thirty of these objects and their implied isotropic-equivalent luminosities show them to be the biggest bangs since the Big Bang itself, beating supernovae by six to nine orders of magnitude. Given the potentially extreme brightness of their optical/near-infrared afterglows in the first seconds and minutes after the burst, rapid multi-band and spectroscopic observations of burst afterglows will not only enable astronomers to probe the physics, environments, and diversity of gamma ray bursts in new and powerful ways, but are also widely expected to be the next great probe of the early universe. PROMPT will consist of six, 0.4-meter diameter telescopes on rapidly slewing mounts that will automatically image gamma ray burst afterglows within seconds of satellite notification. PROMPT will differ from robotic telescopes that have been and are now being built to study gamma ray bursts in three ways: (1) In addition to automatically identifying the afterglow within the satellite-provided error region and measuring it at optical and near infrared wavelengths, PROMPT, with seven-band spectral coverage and four cameras, will automatically estimate the redshift of the burst from Lyman alpha and Lyman-limit dropout and the extinction curve along the line of sight within minutes of the burst; (2) PROMPT will measure the polarization history of the early-time afterglow; and (3) PROMPT will be paired with a large telescope, the 4.1-meter diameter SOAR telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory that is uniquely suited to follow up PROMPT afterglows with optical and NIR spectroscopy on a similarly rapid timescale: PROMPT will leverage SOAR into a significantly more powerful facility, potentially the best in the world for probing the early universe with gamma ray bursts. BROADER IMPACTS: In addition to PROMPT being built and remotely managed primarily by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill astronomy graduate and undergraduate students, and its GRB science being carried out primarily by Chapel Hill students, PROMPT will more broadly impact education through research across North Carolina: Since gamma ray bursts will require no more than about 50% of PROMPT's time, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill will share this resource with every undergraduate institution in the state of North Carolina with an astronomer or with an interest in astronomy, including three historically minority institutions (about 20% of PROMPT's time), with Chapel Hill's Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, which is already designing broad-reaching K-12 programs for PROMPT, funded by a NASA/STScI IDEAS grant (about 10% of PROMPT's time), and through a peer evaluation process the broader astronomical community (about 10% of PROMPT's time). The remaining 10% of PROMPT's time will go to non-GRB science at Chapel Hill. Also, the PI and collaborators will distribute afterglow astrometry, preliminary photometry, temporal and spectral information, and approximate redshifts and extinction curves, which PROMPT will compute in real time, to the broader gamma ray burst community through the Gamma Ray Burst Coordinates Network on a similarly rapid timescale. This award is being funded jointly by the Division of Astronomical Sciences and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities.