Prediction on the very early Afterglow of X-ray Flashes

Y. Z. Fan, D. M. Wei, C. F. Wang

Published 2004-05-24, updated 2004-08-26Version 2

In the past two years, tremendous progresses to understand X-ray Flashes have been made. Now it is widely believed that X-ray Flashes and Gamma-ray Bursts are intrinsically the same, their much different peak energy and flux may be just due to our different viewing angles to them. Here we analytically calculate the very early afterglow of X-ray Flashes, i.e., the reverse shock emission powered by the outflows interacting with the interstellar medium. Assuming $z\sim 0.3$, we have shown that typically the R Band flux of reverse shock emission can be bright to $16\sim 17$th magnitude (the actual values are model dependent and sensitive to the initial Lorentz factor of the viewed ejecta). That emission is bright enough to be detected by the telescope on work today such as ROTSE-III or the upcoming UVOT carried by Swift Satellite, planned for launching in later 2004.