Long-Duration Gamma-Ray Burst Host Galaxies in Emission and Absorption

TL;DR

This paper reviews the diverse properties of long-duration GRB host galaxies in emission and absorption, highlighting their role in understanding galaxy evolution, metallicity dependence, and the high-redshift universe.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent findings on GRB host galaxies, emphasizing their diversity and the insights gained from emission and absorption studies.

Findings

GRB hosts are less massive and metal-poor compared to other core-collapse hosts.

GRBs favor compact and dense galaxy regions, indicating environmental preferences.

Absorption studies reveal properties of the ISM in distant, faint galaxies.

Abstract

The galaxy population hosting long-duration GRBs provides a means to constrain the progenitor and an opportunity to use these violent explosions to characterize the nature of the high-redshift universe. Studies of GRB host galaxies in emission reveal a population of star-forming galaxies with great diversity, spanning a wide range of masses, metallicities, and redshifts. However, as a population GRB hosts are significantly less massive and poorer in metals than the hosts of other core-collapse transients, suggesting that GRB production is only efficient at metallicities significantly below Solar. GRBs may also prefer compact galaxies, and dense and/or central regions of galaxies, more than other types of core-collapse explosion. Meanwhile, studies of hosts in absorption against the luminous GRB optical afterglow provide a unique means of unveiling properties of the ISM in even the faintest and most distant galaxies; these observations are helping to constrain the chemical evolution of galaxies and the properties of interstellar dust out to very high redshifts. New ground- and space-based instrumentation, and the accumulation of larger and more carefully-selected samples, are continually enhancing our view of the GRB host population.