Constraints on the Diverse Progenitors of GRBs from the Large-Scale Environments

Abstract

The pursuit of the progenitors of short duration-hard spectrum gamma-ray bursts (SHBs) draws strongly upon similar quests for the origin of supernovae (SNe) and long duration-soft spectrum GRBs(LSBs). Indeed the notion that, in the absence of smoking guns, the progenitors of cosmic explosions betray their identities both on the global and local scale, motivates the study of SHB redshifts, host galaxies, and locations with respect to hosts. To this end, we suggest both a historical and emergent physical analogy of GRBs with SNe: long-soft GRBs are to core-collapsed supernovae as short-hard GRBs are to Type Ia supernovae ("LSB:CC::SHB:Ia''). Still, the SHB progenitor pursuit is just beginning and we caution that while there are some substantive differences between observations of LSBs and SHBs on large-scales, particularly in host demographics, neither the offset nor the redshift distributions of SHBs are statistically inconsistent with those of LSBs.

arXiv commentInvited review to appear in the Proceedings of the 16th Annual October Astrophysics Conference in Maryland, "Gamma Ray Bursts in the Swift Era", eds. S. Holt, N. Gehrels and J. Nousek; 10 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (7)

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• The Supernova -- Gamma-Ray Burst Connection
• The Progenitors of Short Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Hubble Space Telescope Observations of Short GRB Host Galaxies: Morphologies, Offsets, and Local Environments
• Short gamma-ray bursts from dynamically-assembled compact binaries in globular clusters: pathways, rates, hydrodynamics and cosmological setting
• The Luminous Infrared Host Galaxy of Short-Duration GRB 100206A
• Halo Retention and Evolution of Coalescing Compact Binaries in Cosmological Simulations of Structure Formation: Implications for Short Gamma-Ray Bursts
• Gamma-ray Bursts, Classified Physically
• Quark-Novae in Low-Mass X-ray Binaries with massive neutron stars: A universal model for short-hard Gamma-Ray Bursts