Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) recently published a paper in the journal . The most important discovery in astronomy in 2017 was the groundbreaking discovery of a gravitational wave event GW170817 due to the merger of two neutron stars as well as its associated short GRB (gamma ray burst) 170817A and other electromagnetic counterpart emissions in multi-wavelength. The paper reports an independent analysis of the emission properties of GRB 170817A as well as the physical implications. This paper has 18 authors, including four former UNLV Ph.D. students (He Gao, Ye Li, Hou-Jun Lü, and Bin-Bin Zhang) and three former UNLV postdoc fellows (Wei-Hua Lei, Xue-Feng Wu, and En-Wei Liang) as the key authors. This paper nicely complements the official papers by the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave detector team and the NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope team by studying the luminosity function of short GRBs as well as the possible physical mechanism that powers this unique event.
