Discovery of the short gamma-ray burst GRB 050709
Abstract
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) fall into two classes: short-hard and long-soft bursts. The latter are now known to have X-ray and optical afterglows, to occur at cosmological distances in star-forming galaxies, and to be associated with the explosion of massive stars. In contrast, the distance scale, the energy scale, and the progenitors of short bursts have remained a mystery. Here we report the discovery of a short-hard burst whose accurate localization has led to follow-up observations that have identified the X-ray afterglow and (for the first time) the optical afterglow of a short-hard burst. These, in turn, have led to identification of the host galaxy of the burst as a late-type galaxy at z=0.16 showing that at least some short-hard bursts occur at cosmological distances in the outskirts of galaxies, and are likely to be due to the merging of compact binaries.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0510190,
title = {Discovery of the short gamma-ray burst GRB 050709},
author = {J. S. Villasenor and D. Q. Lamb and G. R. Ricker and J. -L. Atteia and N. Kawai and N. Butler and Y. Nakagawa and J. G. Jernigan and M. Boer and G. B. Crew and T. Q. Donaghy and J. Doty and E. E. Fenimore and M. Galassi and C. Graziani and K. Hurley and A. Levine and F. Martel and M. Matsuoka and J. -F. Olive and G. Prigozhin and T. Sakamoto and Y. Shirasaki and M. Suzuki and T. Tamagawa and R. Vanderspek and S. E. Woosley and A. Yoshida and J. Braga and R. Manchanda and G. Pizzichini and K. Takagishi and M. Yamauchi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0510190},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
19 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Nature