A Catalog of Redshift Estimates for 1366 BATSE Long-Duration Gamma-Ray Bursts: Evidence for Strong Selection Effects on the Phenomenological Prompt Gamma-Ray Correlations

Abstract

We present a catalog of the redshift estimates and probability distributions for 1366 individual Long-duration Gamma-Ray Bursts (LGRBs) detected by the Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE). This result is based on a careful classification and modeling of the population distribution of BATSE LGRBs in the 5-dimensional space of redshift as well as intrinsic prompt gamma-ray emission properties: the isotropic 1024ms peak luminosity (L iso ), the total isotropic emission (E iso ), the spectral peak energy (E pz ), as well as the intrinsic duration (T 90z ), while taking into account the complex detection mechanism of BATSE and sample incompleteness. The underlying assumption in our modeling approach is that LGRBs trace the Cosmic Star Formation Rate and that the joint 4-dimensional distribution of the aforementioned prompt gamma-ray emission properties follows a multivariate lognormal distribution. Our modeling approach enables us to constrain the redshifts of BATSE LGRBs to average uncertainty ranges of 0.7 and 1.7 at 50% and 90% confidence levels, respectively. We compare our predictions with the previous redshift estimates of BATSE GRBs based on the proposed phenomenological high-energy relations, including the lag-luminosity, the spectral peak energy-luminosity, and the variability-luminosity relations. Our predictions are almost entirely at odds with the previous estimates based on these phenomenological high-energy correlations, in particular with the estimates derived from the lag-luminosity and the variability-luminosity relations. There is, however, a weak but significant correlation of strength ∼ 0.26 between our predicted redshift estimates and those derived from the hardness-brightness relations. The discrepancies between the estimates can be explained by the strong influence of sample incompleteness in shaping the phenomenologically proposed highenergy correlations in the literature. The presented catalog here can be useful for demographic studies of LGRBs and studies of individual BATSE events.

A roadmap to gamma-ray bursts: new developments and applications to cosmology

“…As discussed in Ref. [149], this correlation was constructed from a small sample of heterogeneously collected GRBs and is severely affected by sample incompleteness.…”

“…There are claims that the Amati correlation is caused by some selection effect of observations, rather than being an intrinsic property of GRBs [149,154]. However, there is a general consensus on the fact that the correlation is real [155][156][157], though detector sensitivity affects the correlations and a weak fluence dependence may be larger than the statistical uncertainty and contribute to the dispersion of the correlation [158,159].…”

“…As discussed above for the L iso -τ lag correlation, the luminosity-variability correlation as well is severely plagued by sample incompleteness [149].…”

MatDRAM: A pure-MATLAB Delayed-Rejection Adaptive Metropolis-Hastings Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampler

“…Given their fundamental importance and mathematicallysound foundations, their popularity will only grow in the future. In particular, the MCMC techniques have become popular practical tools in many fields of science and engineering, from Astrophysics [e.g., 11,12,13,14] to Bioinformatics and Biomedical Sciences [e.g., 15,16,17].…”

Resolving the excess of long GRB’s at low redshift in the Swift era

“…The mean measured redshifts of the LGRBs indicate that a fainter and more distant population of GRBs than found with the preSwift satellites BATSE, BeppoSAX, INTEGRAL, and HETE-2 was detected. However, it is important to notice that there were many GRBs detected by the preSwift instruments that did not have measured redshifts (e.g., Shahmoradi, & Nemiroff 2019), particularly BATSE, with more than 2700 detected GRBs (e.g., Pačiesas 2004). Hence, it is very likely that BATSE also observed a population of faint and distant GRBs as well, since BATSE's effective area was large enough that it was more sensitive to high-z GRBs than most current instruments (e.g., Tashiro et al 2008).…”