Letter to the Editor

Redshift evolution of the Amati relation: Calibrated results from the Hubble diagram of quasars at high redshifts

¹ Department of Astronomy, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, PR China
e-mail: zxli918@bnu.edu.cn, gaohe@bnu.edu.cn, zhuzh@bnu.edu.cn
² Beijing Planetarium, Beijing 100044, PR China
³ School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan Polytechnic University, Wuhan 430023, PR China

Received: 26 March 2021
Accepted: 22 June 2021

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have long been proposed as a complementary probe to type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and the cosmic microwave background to explore the expansion history of the high-redshift universe, mainly because they are bright enough to be detected at greater distances. Although they lack definite physical explanations, many empirical correlations between GRB isotropic energy or luminosity and some directly detectable spectral or temporal properties have been proposed to make GRBs standard candles. Since the observed GRB rate falls off rapidly at low redshifts, this thus prevents a cosmology independent calibration of these correlations. In order to avoid the circularity problem, SN Ia data are usually used to calibrate the luminosity relations of GRBs in the low redshift region (limited by the redshift range for SN Ia sample), and then they are extrapolate the luminosity relations to the high redshift region. This approach is based on the assumption of no redshift evolution for GRB luminosity relations. In this work, we suggest the use of a complete quasar sample in the redshift range of 0.5 < z < 5.5 to test such an assumption. We divided the quasar sample into several subsamples with different redshift bins, and used each subsample to calibrate the isotropic γ-ray equivalent energy of GRBs in relevant redshift bins. By fitting the newly calibrated data, we find strong evidence that the most commonly used Amati relation between spectral peak energy and isotropic-equivalent radiated energy shows no, or marginal, evolution with redshift. Indeed, at different redshifts, the coefficients in the Amati relation could have a maximum variation of 0.93% at different redshifts, and there could be no coincidence in the range of 1σ.