The First Billion Years project: gamma-ray bursts at z>5

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to explore how gamma-ray bursts at high redshifts can trace cosmic star formation, revealing biases, host galaxy properties, and implications for progenitor models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that LGRB rates can reliably trace the cosmic star formation history at z>5 and identifies host galaxy characteristics that inform progenitor environments.

Findings

LGRB rate traces CSFH at high redshifts.

Proposed LGRB jet opening angle of 0.1 degrees.

Detection of specific host galaxy properties could constrain progenitor models.

Abstract

Long gamma-ray burst's (LGRB's) association to the death of massive stars suggest they could be used to probe the cosmic star formation history (CSFH) with high accuracy, due to their high luminosities. We utilise cosmological simulations from the First Billion Years project to investigate the biases between the CSFH and the LGRB rate at z>5, assuming various different models and constraints on the progenitors of LGRBs. We populate LGRBs using a selection based on environmental properties and demonstrate that the LGRB rate should trace the CSFH to high redshifts. The measured LGRB rate suggests that LGRBs have opening angles of theta_jet=0.1 deg, although the degeneracy with the progenitor model cannot rule out an underlying bias. We demonstrate that proxies that relate the LGRB rate with global LGRB host properties do not reflect the underlying LGRB environment, and are in fact a result of the host galaxy's spatial properties, such that LGRBs can exist in galaxies of solar metallicity. However, we find a class of host galaxies that have low stellar mass and are metal-rich, and that their metallicity dispersions would not allow low-metallicity environments. Detection of hosts with this set of properties would directly reflect the progenitor's environment. We predict that 10% of LGRBs per year are associated with this set of galaxies that would have forbidden line emission that could be detected by instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope. Such a discovery would place strong constraints on the collapsar model and suggest other avenues to be investigated.