GRB with early-time optical emission

Within the context of the standard fireball model, we rule out a reverse shock origin for the early-time optical emission in GRB 090727 and instead conclude that the early-time optical flash likely corresponds to emission from an internal dissipation process.

Putting GRB 090727 into a broader observational and theoretical context, we build a sample of 36 {gamma}-ray bursts (GRBs) with contemporaneous early-time optical and {gamma}-ray detections. From these GRBs, we extract a sub-sample of 18 GRBs, which show optical peaks during prompt {gamma}-ray emission, and perform detailed temporal and spectral analysis in {gamma}-ray, X-ray, and optical bands. We find that in most cases early-time optical emission shows sharp and steep behavior, and notice a rich diversity of spectral properties.