Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2006-05-26
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
12 pages, 2 figures; substantially revised model calculation; accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Science as a Le
Scientific paper
10.1007/s10509-007-9699-x
We examine the recent report by Prochter et al. (2006) that gamma-ray burst (GRB) sight lines have a much higher incidence of strong MgII absorption than quasar sight lines. We propose that the discrepancy is due to the different beam sizes of GRBs and quasars, and that the intervening MgII systems are clumpy with the dense part of each cloudlet of a similar size as the quasars, i.e. < 10^16 cm, but bigger than GRBs. We also discuss observational predictions of our proposed model. Most notably, in some cases the intervening MgII absorbers in GRB spectra should be seen varying, and quasars with smaller sizes should show an increased rate of strong MgII absorbers. In fact, our prediction of variable MgII lines in the GRB spectra has been now confirmed by Hao et al. (2007), who observed intervening FeII and MgII lines at z=1.48 to be strongly variable in the multi-epoch spectra of z=4.05 GRB060206.
Atlee David Wesley
Bentz Misty C.
Dietrich Matthias
Frank Stephan
Mathur Smita
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