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Chandra and Hubble Space Telescope observations of dark gamma-ray bursts and their host galaxies

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posted on 2019-06-11, 13:03 authored by AA Chrimes, AJ Levan, ER Stanway, JD Lyman, AS Fruchter, P Jakobsson, P O'Brien, DA Perley, NR Tanvir, PJ Wheatley, K Wiersema
We present a study of 21 dark gamma-ray burst (GRB) host galaxies, predominantly using X-ray afterglows obtained with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (CXO) to precisely locate the burst in deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of the burst region. The host galaxies are well-detected in F160W in all but one case and in F606W imaging in approx 60 per cent of cases. We measure magnitudes and perform a morphological analysis of each galaxy. The asymmetry, concentration and ellipticity of the dark burst hosts are compared against the host galaxies of optically bright GRBs. In agreement with other studies, we find that dark GRB hosts are redder and more luminous than the bulk of the GRB host population. The distribution of projected spatial offsets for dark GRBs from their host galaxy centroids is comparable to that of optically-bright bursts. The dark GRB hosts are physically larger, more massive and redder, but are morphologically similar to the hosts of bright GRBs in terms of concentration and asymmetry. Our analysis constrains the fraction of high redshift (z greater than 5) GRBs in the sample to approx 14 per cent, implying an upper limit for the whole long-GRB population of less than 4.4 per cent. If dust is the primary cause of afterglow darkening amongst dark GRBs, the measured extinction may require a clumpy dust component in order to explain the observed offset and ellipticity distributions.

Funding

AAC is supported by Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant 1763016. AAC also thanks the William Edwards educational charity. AJL and PJW have been supported by STFC consolidated grant ST/P000495/1. Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. These observations are associated with programs GO 11343, 11840, 12378, 12764, 13117, and 13949 (Levan). Based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory under ESO programme 095.B–0811(C). The scientific results reported in this article are based on observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. This research has made use of software provided by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) in the application of the CIAO package. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant no. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant no. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. IRAF is distributed by the Na

History

Citation

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2019, 486(3), pp. 3105–3117

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Physics and Astronomy

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP), Royal Astronomical Society

eissn

1365-2966

Acceptance date

2019-04-10

Copyright date

2019

Available date

2019-06-11

Publisher version

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/486/3/3105/5462655

Language

en

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