An analysis of the durations of Swift Gamma-Ray Bursts

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes Swift gamma-ray burst durations, confirming bimodal distributions and differences from pre-Swift data, revealing insights into their intrinsic properties and spectral characteristics.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Swift and pre-Swift GRB durations, highlighting differences in intrinsic distributions and spectral hardness trends.

Findings

Observed durations show bimodal distribution with a division at 2 seconds.

Intrinsic durations are narrower and systematically smaller than observed durations.

Swift data exhibits a wider dynamic range of GRB durations.

Abstract

We report the systematic analysis of the durations for Swift gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and compare the results with those of pre-Swift data. For 95 GRBs with known redshift, we show that the observed durations have two lognormal distributions that are clearly divided at $T_{90}\simeq2$ s. This is consistent with the earlier BATSE results. The intrinsic durations also show a bimodal distribution but shift systematically toward the smaller value and the distribution exhibits a narrower width compared with the observed one. We find that the intrinsic distributions of long GRBs between Swift and pre-Swift are significantly different particularly in the width and the median value. In addition, the Swift data exhibit a wider dynamic range of duration. Our present study not only confirms the spectra of short GRBs are in general harder than the long GRBs in the observer frame but also shows this trend becomes weaker in the source frame.