MAGIC observation of the GRB 080430 afterglow

Context. Gamma-ray bursts are cosmological sources emitting radiation from the gamma-rays to the radio band. Substantial observational efforts have been devoted to the study of gamma-ray bursts during the prompt phase, i.e. the initial burst of high-energy radiation, and during the long-lasting afterglows. In spite of many successes in interpreting these phenomena, there are still several open key questions about the fundamental emission processes, their energetics and the environment. Aims: Independently of specific gamma-ray burst theoretical recipes, spectra in the GeV/TeV range are predicted to be remarkably simple, being satisfactorily modeled with power-laws, and therefore offer a very valuable tool to probe the extragalactic background light distribution. Furthermore, the simple detection of a component at very-high energies, i.e. at \~{}100 GeV, would solve the ambiguity about the importance of various possible emission processes, which provide barely distinguishable scenarios at lower energies. Methods: We used the results of the MAGIC telescope observation of the moderate resdhift (z \~{} 0.76) GRB 080430 at energies above about 80 GeV, to evaluate the perspective for late-afterglow observations with ground based GeV/TeV telescopes. Results: We obtained an upper limit of F$_{95% CL}$ = 5.5 {\times} 10$^{-11}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ for the very-high energy emission of GRB 080430, which cannot set further constraints on the theoretical scenarios proposed for this object also due to the difficulties in modeling the low-energy afterglow. Nonetheless, our observations show that Cherenkov telescopes have already reached the required sensitivity to detect the GeV/TeV emission of GRBs at moderate redshift (z łsim} 0.8), provided the observations are carried out at early times, close to the onset of their afterglow phase.