Long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments
Abstract
When massive stars exhaust their fuel they collapse and often produce the extraordinarily bright explosions known as core-collapse supernovae. On occasion, this stellar collapse also powers an even more brilliant relativistic explosion known as a long-duration gamma-ray burst. One would then expect that long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae should be found in similar galactic environments. Here we show that this expectation is wrong. We find that the long gamma-ray bursts are far more concentrated on the very brightest regions of their host galaxies than are the core-collapse supernovae. Furthermore, the host galaxies of the long gamma-ray bursts are significantly fainter and more irregular than the hosts of the core-collapse supernovae. Together these results suggest that long-duration gamma-ray bursts are associated with the most massive stars and may be restricted to galaxies of limited chemical evolution. Our results directly imply that long gamma-ray bursts are relatively rare in galaxies such as our own Milky Way.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0603537,
title = {Long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments},
author = {A. S. Fruchter and A. J. Levan and L. Strolger and P. M. Vreeswijk and S. E. Thorsett and D. Bersier and I. Burud and J. M. Castro Cerón and A. J. Castro-Tirado and C. Conselice and T. Dahlen and H. C. Ferguson and J. P. U. Fynbo and P. M. Garnavich and R. A. Gibbons and J. Gorosabel and T. R. Gull and J. Hjorth and S. T. Holland and C. Kouveliotou and Z. Levay and M. Livio and M. R. Metzger and P. E. Nugent and L. Petro and E. Pian and J. E. Rhoads and A. G. Riess and K. C. Sahu and A. Smette and N. R. Tanvir and R. A. M. J. Wijers and S. E. Woosley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0603537},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
27 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Nature on 22 August 2005, revised 9 February 2006, online publication 10 May 2006. Supplementary material referred to in the text can be found at http://www.stsci.edu/~fruchter/GRB/locations/supplement.pdf . This new version contains minor changes to match the final published version