Dust reddening and extinction curves towards gamma-ray bursts at z > 4

TL;DR

This study investigates dust extinction in high-redshift gamma-ray burst host galaxies, finding less dust than at lower redshifts and that most can be modeled with local extinction curves, with limited evidence for supernova-type dust.

Contribution

It provides new measurements of dust extinction for GRBs at z > 4, showing less dust presence and limited need for SN-type extinction curves, and reports a very high redshift for GRB 100905A.

Findings

GRBs at z > 4 have lower dust extinction than at z ~ 2.

Most GRB afterglows are modeled with local extinction curves.

SN-like dust extinction fits only two of the observed afterglows.

Abstract

Dust is known to be produced in the envelopes of AGB stars, the expanded shells of supernova (SN) remnants, and in situ grain growth in the ISM, although the corresponding efficiency of each of these dust formation mechanisms at different redshifts remains a topic of debate. During the first Gyr after the Big Bang, it is widely believed that there was not enough time to form AGB stars in high numbers, so that the dust at this epoch is expected to be purely from SNe, or subsequent grain growth in the ISM. The time period corresponding to z ~5-6 is thus expected to display the transition from SN-only dust to a mixture of both formation channels as we know it today. Here we aim to use afterglow observations of GRBs at redshifts larger than $z > 4$ in order to derive host galaxy dust column densities along their line-of-sight and to test if a SN-type dust extinction curve is required for some of the bursts. GRB afterglow observations were performed with the 7-channel GROND Detector at the 2.2m MPI telescope in La Silla, Chile and combined with data gathered with XRT. We increase the number of measured $A_V$ values for GRBs at z > 4 by a factor of ~2-3 and find that, in contrast to samples at mostly lower redshift, all of the GRB afterglows have a visual extinction of $A_V$ < 0.5 mag. Analysis of the GROND detection thresholds and results from a Monte-Carlo simulation show that, although we partly suffer from an observational bias against highly extinguished sight-lines, GRB host galaxies at 4 < z < 6 seem to contain on average less dust than at z ~ 2. Additionally, we find that all of the GRBs can be modeled with locally measured extinction curves and that the SN-like dust extinction curve provides a better fit for only two of the afterglow SEDs. For the first time we also report a photometric redshift of $z = 7.88$ for GRB 100905A, making it one of the most distant GRBs known to date.