Letter to the Editor

The spectra of short gamma-ray bursts^*

¹ IASF, via Bassini 15, 20133 Milano, Italy e-mail: ghirlanda@merate.mi.astro.it
² Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, via Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate, Italy
³ SISSA/ISAS, via Beirut 2-4, 34014 Trieste, Italy

Received: 29 October 2003
Accepted: 21 June 2004

Abstract

We present the results of the spectral analysis of a sample of short bright γ-ray bursts (GRB) detected by BATSE and compare them with the average and time resolved spectral properties of long bright bursts. While the spectral parameters of short GRBs confirm, as expected from previous works based on the hardness ratio, that they are harder than long events, we find that this difference is mainly due to a harder low energy spectral component present in short bursts, rather than to a (marginally) different peak energy. Intriguingly our analysis also reveals that the emission properties of short GRBs are similar to the first 2 s of long events. This might suggest that the central engine of long and short GRBs is the same, just working for a longer time for long GRBs. We find that short bursts do not obey the correlation between peak frequency and isotropic emitted energy for any assumed redshift, while they can obey the similar correlation between the peak frequency and isotropic emitted luminosity. This is consistent with (although not a proof of) the idea that short GRBs emit a γ-ray luminosity similar to long GRBs. If they indeed obey the peak frequency – isotropic luminosity relation, we can estimate the redshift distribution of short bursts, which turns out to be consistent with that of long bursts just with a slightly smaller average redshift.