Related papers: Incidence Rate of GRB-host-DLAs at High Redshift
We present results of our HST Cycle 11 Survey for low-redshift (z<1.65) DLAs in the UV spectra of quasars selected from the SDSS Early Data Release. These quasars have strong intervening MgII-FeII systems which are known signatures of high…
We report on follow-up observations of the GRB 060927 using the ROTSE-IIIa telescope and a suite of larger aperture ground-based telescopes. An optical afterglow was detected 20 s after the burst, the earliest rest-frame detection of…
It was suggested that some of the short-duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) are giant flares of Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGR) in nearby galaxies. To test this hypothesis, I have constructed a sample of 47 short GRBs, detected by the…
We aim to understand the nature of the absorbing neutral gas in the galaxies hosting high-redshift long-duration GRBs and to determine their physical conditions. We report the detection of a significant number of previously unidentified…
We present deep Spitzer 3.6 micron observations of three z~5 GRB host galaxies. Our observations reveal that z~5 GRB hosts are a factor of 3 less luminous than the median rest-frame V-band luminosity of spectroscopically confirmed z~5…
A significant fraction (30\%) of well-localized short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs) lack a coincident host galaxy. This leads to two main scenarios: \textit{i}) that the progenitor system merged outside of the visible light of its host, or…
We present high signal-to-noise ratio Gemini and MMT spectroscopy of the optical afterglow of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) 130606A at redshift z=5.913, discovered by Swift. This is the first high-redshift GRB afterglow to have spectra of…
Long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are associated with the explosion of massive stars in star forming regions. A large fraction of GRBs show intrinsic absorption as detected in optical spectra but absorption signatures are also detectable in…
The hard X-ray (2-10keV) luminosity of a star-forming galaxy tracks its population of high mass X-ray binaries and is essentially unobscured. It is therefore a practically unbiased measure of star-formation in the host galaxies of gamma-ray…
Due to their relation to massive stars, long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) allow pinpointing star formation in galaxies independently of redshift, dust obscuration, or galaxy mass/size, thus providing a unique tool to investigate the…
Motivated by the anomalous dust-to-metal ratios derived in the literature for gamma-ray burst (GRB) damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs), we measure these ratios using the dust-depletion pattern observed in UV/optical afterglow spectra…
We present spectroscopic observations of the host galaxy of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) 980703. Several emission and absorption features are detected, making the redshift, z = 0.966, completely unambiguous. This is only the third known…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) are extreme events. They are crudely classified into two groups based on their duration, namely the short and long bursts. Such a classification has proven to be useful to determine their progenitors: the merger of…
Observational follow-up of well localized short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) has left $20-30\%$ of the population without a coincident host galaxy association to deep optical and NIR limits ($\gtrsim 26$ mag). These SGRBs have been classified…
Luminosity function and event rate of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are easily biased by the instrument and selection effects. We select 115 Fermi/GBM GRBs with good spectra fitted by a smoothly broken power-law function. The $\tau$-statistic…
We analyze the gas kinematics of damped Lya systems (DLAs) hosting high z gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and those toward quasars (QSO-DLAs) focusing on threestatistics: (1) dv, the velocity interval encompassing 90% of the totaloptical depth,…
The local power law relationship between the surface densities of neutral hydrogen gas and star formation rate (SFR) can be used to explore the SFR properties of damped Lyman alpha (DLA) systems at higher redshift. We find that while the…
Using the BATSE peak flux distribution we rederive the short GRBs luminosity function and compare it with the observed redshift distribution of long bursts. We show that both distributions are compatible with the assumption that short as…
The number of long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) known to have occurred in the distant Universe (z greater than 5) is small (approx 15), however these events provide a powerful way of probing star formation at the onset of galaxy evolution. In…
We test the hypothesis that the host galaxies of long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as well as quasar-selected damped Lyman-alpha (DLA) systems are drawn from the population of UV-selected star-forming, high-z galaxies (generally…