The Luminosity Function of Long Gamma-Ray Bursts and their rate at z>6
arXiv:0808.0591 · doi:10.1017/S1743921308024848
Abstract
We compute the luminosity function (LF) and the formation rate of long gamma ray bursts (GRBs) in three different scenarios: i) GRBs follow the cosmic star formation and their LF is constant in time; ii) GRBs follow the cosmic star formation but the LF varies with redshift; iii) GRBs form preferentially in low-metallicity environments. We then test model predictions against the Swift 3-year data, showing that scenario i) is robustly ruled out. Moreover, we show that the number of bright GRBs detected by Swift suggests that GRBs should have experienced some sort of luminosity evolution with redshift, being more luminous in the past. Finally we propose to use the observations of the afterglow spectrum of GRBs at z>5.5 to constrain the reionization history and we applied our method to the case of GRB 050904.
arXiv comment5 pages, 5 figures, Conference Proceeding for IAU Symposium 255: Low-Metallicity Star Formaion: From the First Stars to Dwarf Galaxies
References in corpus (13)
- Collapsars - Gamma-Ray Bursts and Explosions in "Failed Supernovae"
- On the normalisation of the cosmic star formation history
- Gamma-Ray Bursts
- GRB Formation Rates inferred from the Spectral Peak Energy - Luminosity Relation
- The BATSE Gamma-Ray Burst Spectral Catalog. I. High Time Resolution Spectroscopy of Bright Bursts using High Energy Resolution Data
- On the Collapsar Model of Long Gamma-Ray Bursts: Constraints from Cosmic Metallicity Evolution
- The Gamma Ray Burst Luminosity Function in the Light of the Swift 2-year Data
- A New Measurement of the Stellar Mass Density at z~5: Implications for the Sources of Cosmic Reionization
- Testing Reionization with Gamma Ray Burst Absorption Spectra
- Gamma Ray Bursts from the early Universe: predictions for present-day and future instruments
- Search for Non-Triggered Gamma Ray Bursts in the BATSE Continuous Records: Preliminary Results
- On the detection of very high redshift Gamma Ray Bursts with Swift
- Near real-time selection of high redshift GRBs with Swift