086286

With the first discovery of a NS merger detected with gravitational wave facilities and ongoing detections of SGRBs detected with gamma-ray satellites it is a golden era to make significant progress in merger studies. A critical link between these populations is the production of relativistic jets and the fraction of mergers that produce relativistic SGRB-like outflows. Deep X-ray observations have played an important role in constraining the collimation of SGRBs as our current knowledge of the opening angle distribution comes almost exclusively from X-ray observations at and amp amp amp gt 1 day after the burst. Here we propose for XMM-Newton TOO observations to monitor a SGRB afterglow and constrain its opening angle which will have significant implications for the energy scales and event rates. [truncated! Please see actual data for full text]