Abstract
The goal of this phase of our research project was to compare current competing models of the structure of the prompt gamma-ray emission that results from the merging of two neutron stars in a binary system, and to see how the differences in proposed parameters affect the detectability of these events from Earth at off-axis angles. A series of programs were written in Python to reproduce two models: a simulation based on the jointly detected GRB170817 by Kathirgamaraju et. al 2017, and a piecewise analytical approximation by Beniamini and Nakar 2018. The simulated model was tested singularly in how the properties of the luminosity profile changed as the parameter gammamin - the minimum allowed speed of the jet that defined its boundary - was raised and lowered, effectively widening and narrowing the jet structure and allowing for more or less successful detection events at large angles. We then attempted to find a broken-power-law approximation of this structure by visually fitting a modified equation from Beniamini and Nakar and generating a new luminosity profile from it. It was found that the modified equation-based structure was able to accurately produce profiles that matched the behavior of both the original simulation and the fully analytical model, though a discrepancy between the two becomes apparent in their comparison that the analytical model predicts significantly higher luminosities at large observation angles than the simulation. Continuing work with this project involves statistically testing the impact of this discrepancy on the rate of successful detection of events.