Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
Introduction
Most of the progress in the gamma-ray burst (GRB) field over the last decade and prior to the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST; Fermi henceforth) occurred in our understanding of the GRB afterglow emission and its surroundings. Classical observational astronomy, from radio to X-rays, played a vital role in this progress as it allowed the identification of GRB counterparts by drastically improving the position accuracy of the bursters down to the sub-arcsec level. Once the afterglows were identified, the full power of optical and near-infrared instrumentation came into play. This resulted in an overwhelming diversity of observational results and consequently in the understanding of the properties of the relativistic outflows, their interaction with the circumsource medium, as well as the surrounding interstellar medium (ISM) and the host galaxies. Here we describe the basic multiwavelength observational properties of afterglows, of both long- and short-duration GRBs, obtained with space- (Table 6.1) and ground-based instruments. The present sample consists of ~550 X-ray and ~350 optical afterglows (see http://www.mpe.mpg.de/~jcg/grbgen.html).
Early searches for transient optical emission
Over the first two decades after the discovery of GRBs (until 1996), GRB localizations were either delayed but accurate (i.e., arcmin localizations on timescales of days, provided by the Interplanetary Network (IPN); Hurley et al. 1999), or rapid but rough (i.e., minutes after the GRB trigger, but with at least 2° error circles, provided by the BATSE Coordinate Distribution Network system (BACODINE); Barthelmy et al. 1994, 1996).
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