From blast wave to observation

Gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows are well described by synchrotron emission originating from the interaction between a relativistic blast wave and the external medium surrounding the GRB progenitor. We introduce a code to reconstruct spectra and light curves from arbitrary fluid configurations, making it especially suited to study the effects of fluid flows beyond those that can be described using analytical approximations. As a check and first application of our code we use it to fit the scaling coefficients of theoretical models of afterglow spectra. We extend earlier results of other authors to general circumburst density profiles. We rederive the physical parameters of GRB 970508 and compare with other authors.
We also show the light curves resulting from a relativistic blast wave encountering a wind termination shock. From high resolution calculations we find that the observed transition from a stellar wind type light curve to an interstellar medium type light curve is smooth and without short-time transitory features.