How to Construct a GRB Engine?

Abstract

According to the fireball model GRBs are produced when a relativistic flow is dissipated by shocks. The questions how does a GRB's "inner engine" accelerates and collimated the relativistic flow is today the most interesting (and most difficult) open question concerning GRBs. We summarize, here, the known constrains on the "inner engines". These constrains arise mostly from the temporal structure seen in the light curves of GRBs. We discuss the well-known NO GO theorem: An explosive source cannot produce a variable GRB. We show that various attempts to find a way around this theorem are rules out by new observational data: similarity between pulse width and pulse intervals and a correlation between a pulse and the preceding interval. We show that a simple toy model explains these features in terms of the internal shocks model. We discuss the implications of these findings to GRBs' inner engines.