Discovery of the short γ-ray burst GRB 050709

By J. Villaseñor, D. Lamb, G. Ricker, J. Atteia, N. Kawai, N. Butler, Y. Nakagawa, J. Jernigan, M. Boer, Geoff Crew and 23 more. Nature, 2005

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) fall into two classes: short-hard and long-soft bursts. The latter are now known to have X-ray and optical afterglows, to occur at cosmological distances in star-forming galaxies, and to be associated with the explosion of massive stars. In contrast, the distance scale, the energy scale and the progenitors of the short bursts have remained a mystery. Here we report the discovery of a short-hard burst whose accurate localization has led to follow-up observations that have identified the X-ray afterglow and (for the first time) the optical afterglow of a short-hard burst; this in turn led to the identification of the host galaxy of the burst as a late-type galaxy at z = 0.16 (ref. 10). These results show that at least some short-hard bursts occur at cosmological distances in the outskirts of galaxies, and are likely to be caused by the merging of compact binaries.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d79438b5925b8af788bade90cea03734229fa027

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. E. Berger
3. B. Metzger
4. E. Nakar
5. E. Quataert
6. T. Piran
7. Pawan Kumar
8. D. Kasen

Citations in the corpus

• Unveiling the origin of X-ray flares in gamma-ray bursts (2010, background): “…the launch of Swift (Gehrels et al. 2004) it was firmly established that short GRBs also have an extragalactic origin (Gehrels et al. 2005; Butler et al. 2005; Villasenor et al. 2005; Barthelmy et al. 2005b) and therefore these bursts involve the emission of a rather large amount of energy as well.”
• Short-Duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2013, background): “The sample includes three short bursts discovered by HETE-2 (GRBs 050709 and 060121;Fox et al. 2005, Hjorth et al. 2005b, Villasenor et al. 2005, de Ugarte Postigo et al. 2006, Levan et al. 2006a) and INTEGRAL (GRB 070707;McGlynn et al. 2008, Piranomonte et al. 2008) for which afterglows and host…”
• Time-dependent models of accretion discs formed from compact object mergers (2008, background): “Support for the merger hypothesis comes from their durations of ∼< 2 s, observations of well-localized short GRBs in galaxies without strong star formation (Berger et al. 2005; Gehrels et al. 2005; Hjorth et al. 2005), and the lack of a detectable coincident supernovae (Hjorth et al. 2005; Bloom et ”
• THE AFTERGLOWS OF SWIFT-ERA GAMMA-RAY BURSTS. II. TYPE I GRB VERSUS TYPE II GRB OPTICAL AFTERGLOWS (2008, background): “While there have also been extremely intense short/hard GRBs, such as GRB 841215 (Laros et al. 1985), GRB 930131 (e.g., Kouveliotou et al. 1994), and GRB 031214 (Hurley et al. 2003), the true breakthrough in the observations only came with the Swift satellite (Gehrels et al. 2004) and its discovery ”
• A Study of Compact Object Mergers as Short Gamma-Ray Burst Progenitors (2006, background): “Swift (Gehrels et al. 2005; Barthelmy et al. 2005) and HETE-II (Villasenor et al. 2005) observations led to precise localizations of several short GRBs, and subsequent follow-up optical observations allowed for tentative connections with their host galaxies and a measurement of their redshifts.”
• The Afterglow, Energetics, and Host Galaxy of the Short-Hard Gamma-Ray Burst 051221a (2006, background): “On the other hand, some of the afterglow observations, in particular the detection of soft X-ray tails and X-ray flares on a timescale ∼> 10 2 s (Barthelmy et al. 2005; Villasenor et al. 2005), cannot be easily explained in the coalescence scenario.”
• Short-hard gamma-ray bursts (2007, background): “Villasenor et al. (2005); Fox et al. (2005); Hjorth et al. (2005a) 3.”
• Flares in Long and Short Gamma-Ray Bursts: A Common Origin in a Hyperaccreting Accretion Disk (2005, background): “…associated with different types of progenitors: namely collapsars for the long GRBs (Stanek et al 2003; Hjorth et al. 2003) and mergers of compact objects for the short ones (Gehrels et al 2005; Bloom et al. 2005; Fox et al. 2005; Villasenor et al. 2005; Barthelmy et al. 2005; Berger et al. 2005).”
• The Ep,i–Eiso correlation in gamma-ray bursts: updated observational status, re-analysis and main implications (2006, methodology): “…thermal emission from the photosphere and the later emission to synchrotron processes occurring in internal shocks, the high Γ would thus produce a short–hard emission possibly followed by a weak soft component, as observed for several short GRBs (Villasenor et al. 2005; Norris & Bonnell 2006).”
• SHORT VERSUS LONG AND COLLAPSARS VERSUS NON-COLLAPSARS: A QUANTITATIVE CLASSIFICATION OF GAMMA-RAY BURSTS (2012, background): “Redshift references: (1) Prochaska et al. 2005a; Gehrels et al. 2005; (2) Villasenor et al. 2005; Fox et al. 2005; (3) Berger et al. 2005; Prochaska et al. 2005b; (4) Gehrels et al. 2005; Berger 2005; Foley et al. 2005; (5) Berger & Soderberg 2005; Soderberg et al. 2006; (6) de Ugarte Postigo et…”
• Making a Short Gamma-Ray Burst from a Long One: Implications for the Nature of GRB 060614 (2006, background): “For example, the lightcurve of GRB 050709 (Villasenor et al. 2005) consists of a short-hard pulse with T90 ∼ 0.2s and a longsoft pulse with T90 ∼ 130s. GRB 050724 (Barthelmy et al. 2005a) has a prominent emission lasting for ∼ 3s fol- 2 lowed by a long, soft, less prominent emission peaking at ∼…”