Review Article

Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts Prompt Emission

Figure 1

Light curves of 12 bright gamma-ray bursts detected by BATSE. Gamma-ray bursts light curves display a tremendous amount of diversity and few discernible patterns. This sample includes short events and long events (duration ranging from milliseconds to minutes), events with smooth behavior and single peaks, and events with highly variable, erratic behavior with many peaks. Created by Daniel Perley with data from the public BATSE archive (http://gammaray.msfc.nasa.gov/batse/grb/catalog/).