Exploring the capabilities of combined modelling strategies for supernova with relativistic jets using Redback

Abstract

Events in which a supernova (SN) is associated with a relativistic jet present multi-component light curves. In the past, the analysis of such complex light curves was carried out largely by investigating each component individually due to limitations in modelling and inference. Such decoupled analyses are susceptible to biased parameter estimation due to cross-contamination between the emission of the relativistic jet and the SN. Additionally, differences in adopted methodologies make it difficult to compare physical parameters across populations. In this work, we investigate three common modelling strategies adopted for events where a Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) is associated with an SN and compare them with a joint model and inference approach. We assess the ability of each approach to fit and reproduce the true injection parameters of 1000 simulated GRB-SN datasets using Redback. We split these datasets into three common GRB-SN light curve morphologies: one where the SN is dominant, one where the GRB is dominant, and one where the SN and GRB have relatively equal contributions to the light curve. We also investigate the behaviour of each modelling technique when the jet break of the GRB afterglow occurs at early times and at late times. We find that treating each component independently with an individual model leads to significant bias in the estimated parameters even though the resulting best fit to the data may appear acceptable. We further demonstrate that afterglow subtraction is unreliable for GRB-SN modelling as uncertainties in the afterglow fit are not fully propagated into the resulting afterglow-subtracted light curve. Instead, our results show that jointly modelling the relativistic jet and SN components provides the most reliable modelling approach, particularly when multi-band X-ray and radio observations are available.