Timing properties of gamma-ray bursts detected by SPI-ACS detector on board of INTEGRAL

TL;DR

This study analyzes timing properties of approximately 1500 gamma-ray bursts detected over 10 years by INTEGRAL's SPI-ACS, revealing differences in duration distributions compared to previous observations and identifying characteristic variability time scales.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive timing analysis of GRBs using SPI-ACS data, highlighting differences in duration distributions and variability time scales compared to other detectors.

Findings

Peak of long GRB duration at ~20 seconds, shorter than BATSE.

Short GRB durations follow a power-law distribution extending below 50 ms.

Many long GRBs exhibit a ~1 second variability time scale.

Abstract

We study timing properties of a large sample of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) detected by the Anti-Coincidence Shield (ACS) of the SPI spectrometer of INTEGRAL telescope. We identify GRB-like events in the SPI-ACS data. The data set under investigation is the history of count rate of the SPI-ACS detector recorded with a binning of 50 ms over the time span of ~10 yr. In spite of the fact that SPI-ACS does not have imaging capability, it provides high statistics signal for each GRB event, because of its large effective area. We classify all isolated excesses in the SPI-ACS count rate into three types: short spikes produced by cosmic rays, GRBs and Solar flare induced events. We find some ~1500 GRB-like events in the 10 yr exposure. A significant fraction of the GRB-like events identified in SPI-ACS occur in coincidence with triggers of other gamma-ray telescopes and could be considered as confirmed GRBs. We study the distribution of durations of the GRBs detected by SPI-ACS and find that the peak of the distribution of long GRBs is at ~ 20, i.e. somewhat shorter than for the long GRBs detected by BATSE. Contrary to the BATSE observation, the population of short GRBs does not have any characteristic time scale. Instead, the distribution of durations extends as a powerlaw to the shortest time scale accessible for SPI-ACS, < 50 ms. We also find that a large fraction of long GRBs has a characteristic variability time scale of the order of 1 s. We discuss the possible origin of this time scale.