GRBs in the Era of Rapid Response Telescopes

NASA's Swift and Fermi satellites continue to chase gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and make ground-breaking discoveries. The resulting science has been greatly enhanced by follow-up studies and coincident event searches from a variety of observatories, including RAPTOR, Watcher, REM, Pi of the Sky, MASTER, iPTF, GROND, GTC, RATIR, DCT, Asiago, Nanshan, Liverpool Robotic Telescope, KAIT, NOT, Gemini, Magellan, Keck, VLT, VLA, ACTA, ALMA, AMI, WSRT, GMRT, CARMA, LOFAR, HAWC, VERITAS, MAGIC, HESS, IceCube, ANTARES, LIGO, HST, Chandra, Spitzer, Fermi, AGILE, INTEGRAL, NuSTAR, IPN, MAXI, CALET, and AstroSAT. These observatories have added to our knowledge of the early-time behavior of GRBs, such as the short-lived reverse-shock which has been seen now in a small handful of the brightest bursts. The emphasis on longer term optical observations, days to weeks after the burst, has increased with the prospects in a few years for multiple active gravitational wave observatories providing good localizations for compact object mergers, and the potential for seeing the isotropic kilonova emission if one of the objects is a neutron star.