Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b

Details Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b

Sep 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005aas...206.4704b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 206, #47.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 37, p.793

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

4

Scientific paper

The localization of the short-duration, hard-spectrum gamma-ray burst GRB 050509b by the Swift satellite was a watershed event. Thanks to the nearly immediate relay of the GRB position, we began imaging the field ˜8 minutes after the burst and have continued during the 8 days since. Though the X-ray Telescope (XRT) discovered an X-ray afterglow, the first ever of a short-hard burst, thus far no convincing optical/infrared candidate afterglow or supernova has been found for the object. We present a re-analysis of the XRT afterglow and find an absolute position that is ˜4 ′ ′ to the west of the XRT position reported previously. Near to this position is a bright elliptical galaxy with redshift z=0.2248 +- 0.0002, about 1′ from the center of a rich cluster of galaxies. We find several fainter galaxies consistent with the XRT position from deep Keck imaging and have obtained Gemini spectra of two of these sources. Based on positional coincidences, we argue that the GRB and the bright elliptical are likely to be physically related. An exploration of the properties of the burst and the afterglow shows that GRB 050509b was underluminous in both respects relative to long-duration GRBs. However, we argue for a comparable (and high) gamma-ray efficiency conversion in long-soft and short-hard GRBs. Based on this analysis, on the location of the GRB, and on the galaxy type, we suggest that there is now observational support for the hypothesis that short-hard bursts arise during the merger of a compact binary.

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