Analysis of the observed and intrinsic durations of gamma-ray bursts with known redshift

TL;DR

This study analyzes the duration distributions of 408 gamma-ray bursts with known redshifts, finding that observed durations are trimodal but become unimodal in the rest frame, highlighting sample size limitations in classifying GRB durations.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological modeling approach using various skewed distributions to better understand GRB duration classifications and assesses the presence of an intermediate class.

Findings

Observed durations are best described by a trimodal distribution.

In the rest frame, durations are most consistent with a unimodal distribution.

Sample size limits definitive conclusions about GRB duration classifications.

Abstract

The duration distribution of 408 GRBs with measured both duration $T_{90}$ and redshift $z$ is examined. Mixtures of a number of distributions (standard normal, skew-normal, sinh-arcsinh, and alpha-skew-normal) are fitted to the observed and intrinsic durations using the maximum log-likelihood method. The best fit is chosen via the Akaike information critetion. The aim of this work is to assess the presence of the presumed intermediate GRB class, and to provide a phenomenological model more appropriate than the common mixture of standard Gaussians. While $\log T^{obs}_{90}$ are well described by a truly trimodal fit, after moving to the rest frame the statistically most significant fit is unimodal. To trace the source of this discrepancy, 334 GRBs observed only by $Swift$/BAT are examined in the same way. In the observer frame, this results in a number of statistically plausible descriptions, being uni- and bimodal, and with the number of components ranging from one to three. After moving to the rest frame, no unambiguous conclusions may be put forward. It is concluded that the size of the sample is not big enough to infer reliably GRB properties based on a univariate statistical reasoning only.