Orateur
Description
Robotic telescope networks equipped with next-generation automated follow-up pipelines are enabling systematic exploration of gamma-ray burst afterglows during the first 20 minutes after trigger, a regime that has historically remained sparsely sampled. High-cadence optical observations obtained in the earliest post-trigger seconds reveal temporal and spectral features inaccessible to later or lower-cadence measurements, including evidence of a thermally distributed electron population in events such as GRB 250702F and newly identified correlations between spectral and temporal afterglow properties. The rapid transient-detection and photometric analysis techniques developed for these observations may prove applicable to a broader range of fast astrophysical transients.