Temporal properties of the short gamma-ray bursts

¹ Department of Experimental Physics, University College Dublin, Dublin 4, Ireland
² X-Ray Astronomy Group, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Leicester University, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK

Corresponding author: S. McBreen, smcbreen@bermuda.ucd.ie

Received: 29 August 2001
Accepted: 22 October 2001

Abstract

A temporal analysis has been performed on a sample of 100 bright gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) with s from the BATSE Current Catalog. The GRBs were denoised using a median filter and subjected to an automated pulse selection algorithm as an objective way of identifing the effects of neighbouring pulses. The rise times, fall times, FWHM, pulse amplitudes and areas were measured and the frequency distributions are presented here. All are consistent with lognormal distributions. The distribution of time intervals between pulses is not random but consistent with a lognormal distribution. The time intervals between pulses and pulse amplitudes are highly correlated with each other. These results are in excellent agreement with a similar analysis that revealed lognormal distributions for pulse properties and correlated time intervals between pulses in bright GRBs with s. The two sub-classes of GRBs appear to have the same emission mechanism which is probably caused by internal shocks. They may not have the same progenitors because of the generic nature of the fireball model.