he X-Ray/Gamma-Ray Spectrometer on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft will remotely sense X-ray and gamma-ray emissions from the surface of near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros and look for characteristic “signatures” in those emissions to determine its elemental composition. During the planned 10 months of orbits about Eros beginning in early 1999, data returned from the instrument w...

The afterglow emission has become the main stream of Gamma-Ray burst research since its discovery three years ago. With the distance-scale enigma solved, the study of the late-time GRB emission is now the most promising approach to disclose the origin of these explosions and their relationship with the environment of the host galaxy in the early phase of the Universe. In this contribution I wil...

Observational evidence of iron absorption and emission lines in X-ray spectra of Gamma-Ray Bursts is quite compelling. I will briefly review the results, summarize different models and describe the connection with massive progenitors in star-forming regions implied by these results. This link is also supported by measurements of the X-ray absorbing gas in several GRB’s, with column density cons...

Throughout the history of computer graphics, a very active area of research has been the attempt to create convincing, life-like images. Ray tracing is a technique for generating photorealistic images, and can easily support a wide range of natural phenomenon. However, producing a ray traced image is very expensive; and producing a ray traced animation is often prohibitively expensive. This the...

A weakly magnetized (∼ 107G) neutron star, slowly spun up by accretion in an X-ray binary, crosses the instability boundary for r-mode instability at P=1–2 msec. The amplitude of the oscillation, which initially increases only at the spinup time scale, is secularly unstable due to the negative temperature dependence of the viscosity in neutron star matter, and diverges after a few hundred years...

We consider possible interpretations of the recently detected X-ray afterglow from the gamma-ray burst source GRB 970228. Cosmological and Galactic models of gamma-ray bursts predict different flux and spectral evolution of X-ray afterglows. We show that models based on adiabatic expansion of relativistic forward shocks require very efficient particle energization or post-burst re-acceleration ...

The degree and the temporal evolution of linear polarization in the prompt and afterglow emission of gamma-ray bursts is a very robust diagnostic of some key features of gamma-ray bursts jets and their micro and macro physics. In this contribution, I review the current status of the theory of polarized emission from GRB jets during the prompt, optical flash, and afterglow emission. I compare th...