Long γ-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments

By A. Fruchter, A. Levan, L. Strolger, P. Vreeswijk, S. Thorsett, D. Bersier, I. Burud, J. M. C. Ceron, A. Castro-Tirado, Christopher J. Conselice and 23 more. Nature, 2006

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When massive stars exhaust their fuel, they collapse and often produce the extraordinarily bright explosions known as core-collapse supernovae. On occasion, this stellar collapse also powers an even more brilliant relativistic explosion known as a long-duration γ-ray burst. One would then expect that these long γ-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae should be found in similar galactic environments. Here we show that this expectation is wrong. We find that the γ-ray bursts are far more concentrated in the very brightest regions of their host galaxies than are the core-collapse supernovae. Furthermore, the host galaxies of the long γ-ray bursts are significantly fainter and more irregular than the hosts of the core-collapse supernovae. Together these results suggest that long-duration γ-ray bursts are associated with the most extremely massive stars and may be restricted to galaxies of limited chemical evolution. Our results directly imply that long γ-ray bursts are relatively rare in galaxies such as our own Milky Way.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4cb9397771774f15a00e91e152f1987347c603fa

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A POPULATION OF MASSIVE, LUMINOUS GALAXIES HOSTING HEAVILY DUST-OBSCURED GAMMA-RAY BURSTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE USE OF GRBs AS TRACERS OF COSMIC STAR FORMATION (2013, background): “This prediction generally seems to be upheld— the hosts of GRBs are ubiquitously young and essentially always show evidence of recent star formation, both in an integrated sense (e.g., Savaglio et al. 2009) and at the precise location of the GRB within the galaxy (Fruchter et al. 2006).”
THE FIRST POSITIVE DETECTION OF MOLECULAR GAS IN A GRB HOST GALAXY (2009, background): “The evidence for this is both direct, such as the observation of a contemporaneous supernova associated with some events (e.g., Stanek et al. 2003; Hjorth et al. 2003), and circumstantial, based on physical associations with star forming galaxies (see Fruchter et al. 2006).”
Luminous blue variables are antisocial: their isolation implies that they are kicked mass gainers in binary evolution (2014, background): “This may be especially true for more extreme or rare explosions that may require special evolutionary paths in binaries, such as long GRBs (Kelly et al. 2014; Fruchter et al. 2006).”
CALCIUM-RICH GAP TRANSIENTS IN THE REMOTE OUTSKIRTS OF GALAXIES (2011, background): “At higher energies, gamma-ray burst offsets from host galaxies offered a clue to their progenitors (Fruchter et al. 2006; Bloom et al. 2006).”
Revealing the High-Redshift Star Formation Rate with Gamma-Ray Bursts (2008, background): “Since GRBs are observed to favor subluminous host galaxies (Fynbo et al. 2003; Le Floc’h et al. 2003; Fruchter et al. 2006), they may be probing such faint galaxies.”
Progenitor mass constraints for core-collapse supernovae from correlations with host galaxy star formation⋆ (2012, methodology): “More recently, a pixel statistics technique has been developed (Fruchter et al. 2006; James & Anderson 2006) which allows one to investigate SN distributions in a more systematic way.”
THE MILLISECOND MAGNETAR CENTRAL ENGINE IN SHORT GRBs (2015, background): “Long GRBs are found to be associated with corecollapse supernovae (SNe; e.g. Galama et al. 1998; Hjorth et al. 2003; Stanek et al. 2003; Campana et al. 2006; Xu et al. 2013), and occur typically in irregular galaxies with intense star formation (Fruchter et al. 2006).”
A New Population of High-Redshift Short-Duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2006, background): “Second, even in the sample of long GRBs, which are thought to be biased in favor of low-luminosity galaxies (Fruchter et al. 2006; Stanek et al. 2006), all galaxies with R > 23 mag are located at z > 0.7 (Figure 9).”
The SEDs and host galaxies of the dustiest GRB afterglows (2011, background): “…and consists mainly of young and vigorously star-forming galaxies with sub-L∗ luminosities and masses around 109 M (e.g., Bloom et al. 1998; Le Floc’h et al. 2003; Christensen et al. 2004; Fruchter et al. 2006; Michałowski et al. 2008; Savaglio et al. 2009, referenced as SGL09, hereafter).”
SHORT VERSUS LONG AND COLLAPSARS VERSUS NON-COLLAPSARS: A QUANTITATIVE CLASSIFICATION OF GAMMA-RAY BURSTS (2012, background): “The position distribution of LGRBs within their host, toward the center and within high star-forming regions (Fruchter et al. 2006), differs from the position distribution of SGRBs within their hosts, which is more diffuse and with no apparent association with star formation (Barthelmy et al. 2005;…”
CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVAE FROM THE PALOMAR TRANSIENT FACTORY: INDICATIONS FOR A DIFFERENT POPULATION IN DWARF GALAXIES (2010, background): “An attractive complementary study is to analyze the locations of our SNe within their host galaxies (e.g., as done by Fruchter et al. 2006 and Kelly et al. 2008 on similar-sized samples).”
DISCERNING THE PHYSICAL ORIGINS OF COSMOLOGICAL GAMMA-RAY BURSTS BASED ON MULTIPLE OBSERVATIONAL CRITERIA: THE CASES OF z = 6.7 GRB 080913, z = 8.2 GRB 090423, AND SOME SHORT/HARD GRBs (2009, background): “A group of GRBs are hosted by active star-forming dwarf galaxies (Fruchter et al. 2006), some of which have clear (Type Ic) supernova associations (Hjorth et al. 2003; Stanek et al. 2003; Campana et al. 2006; Pian et al. 2006).”
Long γ-Ray Bursts and Type Ic Core-Collapse Supernovae Have Similar Locations in Hosts (2007, methodology): “The study of LGRBs has used the locations of events in high redshift hosts to good effect (Bloom et al. 2002; Fruchter et al. 2006).”