Flares in Gamma Ray Bursts

The flare activity that is observed in GRBs soon after the prompt emission with the XRT (0.3–10 KeV) instrument on Board of the Swift satellite is leading to important clues in relation to the physical characteristics of the mechanism generating the emission of energy in Gamma Ray Bursts. We will briefly refer to the results obtained with the recent analysis [1] and [2] and discuss the preliminary results we obtained with a new larger sample of GRBs [limited to early flares] based on fitting of the flares using the Norris 2005 profile. We find, in agreement with previous results, that XRT flares follow the main characteristics observed in [3] for the prompt emission spikes. The estimate of the flare energy for the subsample with redshift is rather robust and an attempt is made, using the redshisft sample, to estimate how the energy emitted in flares depends on time. We used a H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, ΩΛ = 0.7, Ωm = 0.3 cosmology.