The Possible Impact of GRB Detector Thresholds on Cosmological Standard Candles

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Scientific paper

Rate now

  [ 0.00 ] – not rated yet Voters 0   Comments 0

Details

Nov-03-2011: Minor correction to the horizontal axis in the plot of Figure 3. The updated draft now matches the published vers

Scientific paper

10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17805.x

GRB satellites are relatively inefficient detectors of dim hard bursts because they trigger on photon counts, which are number-biased against hard photons. Therefore, for example, given two bursts of identical peak luminosity near the detection threshold, a dim soft burst will be preferentially detected over a dim hard burst. This detector bias can create or skew an apparent correlation where increasingly hard GRBs appear increasingly bright. Although such correlations may be obfuscated by a middle step where GRBs need to be bright enough to have their actual redshifts determined, it is found that the bias is generally pervasive. This result is derived here through simulations convolving a wide variety of possible GRB brightnesses and spectra with the BATSE Large Area Detectors (LAD) detection thresholds. The presented analyses indicate that the rest-frame $\nu F_{\nu}$ spectrum peak energy of long-duration GRBs, $\epi$, is not a good cosmological standard candle without significant corrections for selection effects. Therefore, the appearance of $\epi$ in seeming correlations such as the Amati ($E_{iso}-\epi$), Ghirlanda ($E_{\gamma}-\epi$), and $L_{iso}-\epi$ relations is statistically real but strongly influenced by so far uncalibrated GRB detector thresholds.

No associations

LandOfFree

Say what you really think

Search LandOfFree.com for scientists and scientific papers. Rate them and share your experience with other people.

Rating

The Possible Impact of GRB Detector Thresholds on Cosmological Standard Candles does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with The Possible Impact of GRB Detector Thresholds on Cosmological Standard Candles, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and The Possible Impact of GRB Detector Thresholds on Cosmological Standard Candles will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

     

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-408378

  Search
All data on this website is collected from public sources. Our data reflects the most accurate information available at the time of publication.