Document Type
Article
Source Publication Title
Astronomy & Astrophysics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202348599
Abstract
Context. The existence of a plateau in the short-duration tail of the observed distribution of cosmological long-soft gamma ray bursts (LGRBs) is posited to be the first direct evidence of collapsars. A similar plateau in the short-duration tail of the observed duration distribution of short-hard gamma ray bursts (SGRBs) has been suggested as evidence of compact binary mergers.
Aims. We present an equally plausible alternative interpretation for this evidence, based on a purely statistical approach.
Methods. Specifically, we show that the observed plateau in the short-duration tail of the duration distribution of LGRBs can naturally occur in the statistical distributions of strictly positive physical quantities, exacerbated by the e ects of mixing with the duration distribution of SGRBs, observational selection e ects, and data aggregation (e.g., binning) methodologies. The observed plateau in the short-duration tail of the observed distributions of SGRBs may likewise result from a combination of sample incompleteness and inhomogeneous binning of data. We further confirm the impact of these factors on the observation of a plateau in the duration distributions of GRBs through extensive numerical Monte Carlo simulations.
Results. This analysis corroborates and strengthens a purely statistical and sample-incompleteness interpretation of the observed plateau in the duration distribution of LGRBs and SGRBs, without invoking the physics of collapsars or jet-propagation through the stellar envelope.
Disciplines
Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Publication Date
7-2-2024
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Osborne, Joshua Alexander; Bryant, Christopher Michael; Bagheri, Fatemeh; and Shahmoradi, Amir, "Alternative statistical interpretation for the apparent plateaus in the duration distributions of gamma-ray bursts" (2024). Open Initiatives Grant Funded Publications. 14.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/utalibraries_openinitiativespubs/14
