A study of gamma ray bursts with afterglow plateau phases associated with supernovae

¹ INAF-Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica cosmica, c/o CNR – Area della Ricerca di Bologna, via Gobetti 101, 40129 Bologna, Italy
² Physics Department, Stanford University, 382 Via Pueblo Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-4060, USA
e-mail: mdainott@stanford.edu
³ Obserwatorium Astronomiczne, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, ul. Orla 171, 31-501 Kraków, Poland
e-mail: dainotti@oa.uj.edu.pl
⁴ Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory, Riken, 351-0198 Wako Saitama, Japan
⁵ Department of Astronomy, Kyoto University, Kitashirakawa-Oiwake-cho, Sakyo-ku, 606-8502 Kyoto, Japan
⁶ Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), University of Tokyo, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa, 277-8583 Chiba, Japan
⁷ Bloomington, Indiana University, IN 47408, USA
⁸ Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 56126 Pisa, Italy

Received: 26 February 2016
Accepted: 9 November 2016

Abstract

Context. The analysis of 176 gamma ray burst (GRB) afterglow plateaus observed by Swift from GRBs with known redshifts revealed that the subsample of long GRBs associated with supernovae (LONG-SNe), comprising 19 events, presents a very high correlation coefficient between the luminosity at the end of the plateau phase L_X(T_a) = L_a and the end time of the plateau T^*_a. Furthermore, these SNe Ib/c associated with GRBs also obey the peak-magnitude stretch relation, which is similar to that used to standardize the SNe Ia.

Aims. Our aim is to investigate a category of GRBs with plateau and associated with SNe to compare our correlation for this sample with the correlation for long GRBs for which no associated SN has been observed (hereafter LONG-NO-SNe, 128 GRBs) and to check whether there is a difference among these subsamples.

Methods. We first adopted a nonparametric statistical method to take redshift evolution into account and to check if and how this effect may steepen the slope for the LONG-NO-SNe sample. This procedure is necessary because this sample is observed at much higher redshift than the GRB-SNe sample. Therefore, removing selection bias is the first step before any comparison among samples observed at different redshifts could be properly performed. Then, we applied the T-student test to evaluate a statistical difference between the slopes of the two samples.

Results. We demonstrate that there is no evolution for the slope of the LONG-NO-SNe sample and no evolution is expected for GRBs observed at small redshifts such as those present in the LONG-SNe sample. The difference between the slope of the LONG-NO-SNe and the slope of LONG-SNe, i.e., those with firm spectral detection of SN components, is statistically significant (P = 0.005).

Conclusions. This possibly suggests that, unlike LONG-NO-SNe, LONG-SNe with firm spectroscopic features of the associated SNe might not require a standard energy reservoir in the plateau phase. Therefore, this analysis may open new perspectives in future theoretical investigations of the GRBs with plateau emission and that are associated with SNe.