Long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments

Details Long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments Long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments

2006-03-20

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0603537v2

Nature441:463-468,2006

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

27 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Nature on 22 August 2005, revised 9 February 2006, online publication 10 May 2006. Supplemen

Scientific paper

10.1038/nature04787

When massive stars exhaust their fuel they collapse and often produce the extraordinarily bright explosions known as core-collapse supernovae. On occasion, this stellar collapse also powers an even more brilliant relativistic explosion known as a long-duration gamma-ray burst. One would then expect that long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae should be found in similar galactic environments. Here we show that this expectation is wrong. We find that the long gamma-ray bursts are far more concentrated on the very brightest regions of their host galaxies than are the core-collapse supernovae. Furthermore, the host galaxies of the long gamma-ray bursts are significantly fainter and more irregular than the hosts of the core-collapse supernovae. Together these results suggest that long-duration gamma-ray bursts are associated with the most massive stars and may be restricted to galaxies of limited chemical evolution. Our results directly imply that long gamma-ray bursts are relatively rare in galaxies such as our own Milky Way.

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