The afterglow and elliptical host galaxy of the short γ-ray burst GRB 050724

By E. Berger, P. Price, S. Cenko, A. Gal-yam, A. Soderberg, M. Kasliwal, D. Leonard, P. B. Cameron, D. Frail, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni and 14 more. Nature, 2005

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite a rich phenomenology, γ-ray bursts (GRBs) are divided into two classes based on their duration and spectral hardness—the long-soft and the short-hard bursts. The discovery of afterglow emission from long GRBs was a watershed event, pinpointing their origin to star-forming galaxies, and hence the death of massive stars, and indicating an energy release of about 1051 erg. While theoretical arguments suggest that short GRBs are produced in the coalescence of binary compact objects (neutron stars or black holes), the progenitors, energetics and environments of these events remain elusive despite recent localizations. Here we report the discovery of the first radio afterglow from the short burst GRB 050724, which unambiguously associates it with an elliptical galaxy at a redshift z = 0.257. We show that the burst is powered by the same relativistic fireball mechanism as long GRBs, with the ejecta possibly collimated in jets, but that the total energy release is 10–1,000 times smaller. More importantly, the nature of the host galaxy demonstrates that short GRBs arise from an old (> 1 Gyr) stellar population, strengthening earlier suggestions and providing support for coalescing compact object binaries as the progenitors.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f80ecedccca64444bcce65f20ea905749cbe53a5

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

In Instrumentation

1. Bing Zhang
2. B. Metzger
3. E. Berger
4. E. Liang
5. Stan Woosley
6. Stephan Rosswog
7. Luke F. Roberts
8. E. Quataert

Citations in the corpus

• A Study of Compact Object Mergers as Short Gamma-Ray Burst Progenitors (2006, background): “GRB 050724 was found within a small elliptical galaxy with no current star formation at a redshift of 0.258 (Berger et al. 2005a).”
• The Proto-Magnetar Model for Gamma-Ray Bursts (2010, result): “This model is consistent with the host galaxy demographics, and the lack of a bright supernova, associated with short GRBs (e.g. Bloom et al. 2006; Berger et al. 2005; Hjorth et al. 2005; Perley et al. 2009; Berger 2010; Fong et al. 2010).”
• Making a Short Gamma-Ray Burst from a Long One: Implications for the Nature of GRB 060614 (2006, background): “(Gehrels et al. 2005; Bloom et al. 2006; Barthelmy et al. 2005a; Berger et al. 2005).”
• IDENTIFYING ELUSIVE ELECTROMAGNETIC COUNTERPARTS TO GRAVITATIONAL WAVE MERGERS: AN END-TO-END SIMULATION (2012, background): “Therefore, the maximum detectable distance range of Net3a does not include the distances of the three closest SGRBs observed so far.”
• The Ep,i–Eiso correlation in gamma-ray bursts: updated observational status, re-analysis and main implications (2006, background): “…other recently localized short GRBs with possible redshifts, GRB050509b (Gehrels et al. 2005; Pedersen et al. 2005), GRB050724 (Krimm et al. 2005; Berger et al. 2005) and GRB050813 (Sato et al. 2005b; Berger 2005), indicate a likely inconsistence with the Ep,i – Eiso correlation, even though an…”
• Evidence for a Canonical Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglow Light Curve in the Swift XRT Data (2005, background): “…hole (e.g., Paczyński 1991), was given strong support recently with the detection of afterglow emission from three short GRBs: 050509B, 050709, and 050724 (Bloom et al. 2006; Gehrels et al. 2005; Hjorth et al. 2005; Lee et al. 2005; Berger et al. 2005a; Covino et al. 2006; Barthelmy et al. 2006).”
• The rate, luminosity function and time delay of non-Collapsar short GRBs (2014, background): “…(sGRBs) remained obscure until 2005 when the HETE-2 and Swift satellites detected the first sGRB afterglows from GRBs 050509b, 050709 and 050724 (Berger et al. 2005; Castro-Tirado et al. 2005; Fox et al. 2005; Gehrels et al. 2005; Hjorth et al. 2005a,b; Prochaska et al. 2005; Bloom et al. 2006;…”
• Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger (2017, background): “…(for reviews see Nakar 2007; Berger 2014) with the identification of the first host galaxies of sGRBs and multi-wavelength observation (from X-ray to optical and radio) of their afterglows (Berger et al. 2005; Fox et al. 2005; Gehrels et al. 2005; Hjorth et al. 2005b; Villasenor et al. 2005).”
• A New Population of High-Redshift Short-Duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (2006, background): “Initial observations suggested that short GRBs occur at significantly lower redshifts than long GRBs (for which 〈z〉 ∼ 3; e.g., Berger et al. 2005a; Jakobsson et al. 2006).”
• Short-hard gamma-ray bursts (2007, methodology): “A few examples are SHBs 050709 (p ≈ 2.5; Fox et al. , 2005; Panaitescu, 2006)), 050724 (p=2-3; Berger et al. , 2005; Panaitescu, 2006) and 051221 (p ≈ 2.2; Soderberg et al. , 2006a; Burrows et al. , 2006) where broad-band modeling (radio to X-ray) gives a reasonable description of the observed…”
• Follow Up of GW170817 and Its Electromagnetic Counterpart by Australian-Led Observing Programmes (2017, background): “However, past sGRBs that were detected in the radio despite being 30–60 times more distant than this event (Berger et al. 2005; Soderberg et al. 2006; Fong et al. 2014; PASA, 34, e069 (2017) doi:10.1017/pasa.2017.65 Zhang et al. 2017) imply that future neutron star mergers at these (40 Mpc)…”
• The Electromagnetic Counterpart of the Binary Neutron Star Merger LIGO/Virgo GW170817. VI. Radio Constraints on a Relativistic Jet and Predictions for Late-time Emission from the Kilonova Ejecta (2017, background): “A decade of SGRB radio follow-up at GHz frequencies yielded four detections and multiple upper limits (Berger et al. 2005; Soderberg et al. 2006; Fong et al. 2014, 2015), providing tight constraints on the energetics and densities of the burst environments.”
• A novel explosive process is required for the γ-ray burst GRB 060614 (2006, background): “Note that while some evolution in the temporal and spectral properties of this GRB were observed, the emission remained highly variable and relatively hard for tens of seconds, unlike the situation observed for a few short bursts with long, soft “tails”.(10,7) This indicates sustained activity of an”
• AN r-PROCESS KILONOVA ASSOCIATED WITH THE SHORT-HARD GRB 130603B (2013, background): “This evidence includes the location of some short GRBs in elliptical galaxies (Berger et al. 2005; Gehrels et al. 2005; Bloom et al. 2006; Fong et al. 2011, 2013); the absence of associated supernova (Hjorth et al. 2005a,b; Soderberg et al. 2006; Kocevski et al. 2010); the distribution of explosion…”
• Time-dependent models of accretion discs formed from compact object mergers (2008, background): “If α ∼< 10 −3, tthick may be large enough to explain the ∼ 30 s delay until flaring observed for some short GRBs (e.g., Berger et al. 2005; Villasenor et al. 2005).”
• Short-duration gamma-ray bursts with extended emission from protomagnetar spin-down (2007, background): “If AIC or WD-WD mergers indeed produce SGRBEEs, these events should be bound to both early and late type galaxies; indeed, the well-known SGRBEEs 050709 and 050724 were localized to a star forming galaxy and an elliptical galaxy, respectively (Villasenor et al. 2005; Berger et al. 2005).”
• A Comprehensive Analysis of Swift XRT Data. III. Jet Break Candidates in X-Ray and Optical Afterglow Light Curves (2007, background): “It can trigger on more, less energetic GRBs at higher redshifts (Berger et al. 2005b; Jakobsson et al. 2006c).”
• A DECADE OF SHORT-DURATION GAMMA-RAY BURST BROADBAND AFTERGLOWS: ENERGETICS, CIRCUMBURST DENSITIES, AND JET OPENING ANGLES (2015, methodology): “Four bursts have detected radio afterglows, and all discoveries were made with the VLA (GRB 050724A: Berger et al. 2005; Panaitescu 2006; GRB 051221A: Soderberg et al. 2006; GRB 130603B: Fong et al. 2014; GRB 140903A: this work).”