Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b

J. S. Bloom, J. X. Prochaska, D. Pooley +25

The localization of the short-duration, hard-spectrum GRB 050509b was a watershed event. Thanks to the nearly immediate relay of the GRB position by Swift, we began imaging the GRB…