Constraining GRB progenitors environment with Swift XRT

TL;DR

This study compares the environments of long and short GRBs using Swift XRT data, analyzing neutral hydrogen absorption to infer differences in their progenitors' locations within host galaxies.

Contribution

It provides a coherent analysis of hydrogen column densities for GRB types, incorporating additional data to improve statistical significance.

Findings

Short GRBs tend to have lower median absorption than long GRBs.

Adding GRBs without redshift measurements marginally increases the observed difference.

The difference in environments between long and short GRBs is suggestive but not statistically significant.

Abstract

The characteristics of the Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) environment may reflect the differences in GRB progenitors: long GRBs are expected to be found in high-density star-forming regions of the GRB host galaxies, while short ones may be associated with an older stellar population that may have had the time to travel far from stellar forming regions in potentially lower density regions. The latter is related to the hypothesis that short GRBs are associated to the merging of compact objects (BH-NS or NS-NS). We used the Swift XRT GRB afterglow archive to compare the intrinsic neutral hydrogen column density values for long and short GRBs within the redshift range 0.1- 1.3, performing a coherent analysis, and excluding from our analysis observations with poor statistics, which reduced our sample to 15 short GRBs. While short GRBs effectively show a median absorption value smaller than long ones the result is not statistically significant. In order to increase our sample we added short GRBs without redshift measure, and we assigned them random redshifts in the same range achieving a marginal increase in the statistical difference between long and short GRBs.