Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2006-01-11
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
To appear in the proceedings of the 16th Annual October Astrophysics Conference in Maryland, "Gamma Ray Bursts in the Swift Er
Scientific paper
10.1063/1.2207949
We report on the first mid-infrared observations of 16 GRB host galaxies performed with the Spitzer Space Telescope, and investigate the presence of evolved stellar populations and dust-enshrouded star-forming activity associated with GRBs. Only a very small fraction of our sample is detected by Spitzer, which is not consistent with recent works suggesting the presence of a GRB host population dominated by massive and strongly-starbursting galaxies (SFR > ~100 Msol/yr). Should the GRB hosts be representative of star-forming galaxies at high redshift, models of galaxy evolution indicate that >~50% of GRB hosts would be easily detected at the depth of our mid-infrared observations. Unless our sample suffers from a strong observational bias which remains to be understood, we infer in this context that the GRBs identified with the current techniques can not be directly used as unbiased probes of the global and integrated star formation history of the Universe.
Armus Lee
Charmandaris Vassilios
Devost Daniel
Forrest William John
Le Floc'h Emeric
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