A&A 490, 31-36 (2008)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:200810337
S. Capozziello1 - L. Izzo1,2,3
1 - Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche, Università di Napoli
``Federico II'' and INFN Sez. di Napoli, Compl. Univ. Monte S.
Angelo, Ed. N, via Cinthia, 80126 Napoli, Italy
2 -
ICRANet and ICRA, Piazzale della Repubblica 10, 65122 Pescara, Italy
3 -
Dip. di Fisica, Università di Roma ``La Sapienza'', Piazzale Aldo
Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy
Received 6 June 2008 / Accepted 11 August 2008
Abstract
Aims. Relations connecting gamma ray burst quantities can be used to constrain cosmographic parameters of the Hubble law at medium-high redshifts.
Methods. We consider a sample of 27 gamma ray bursts to construct the luminosity distance to redshift relation and derive the values of the parameters q0, j0, and s0. The analysis is compared with other methods in the literature.
Results. Gamma gay bursts, if calibrated by SNeIa, seem reliable as distance indicators and give cosmographic parameters in agreement with the CDM model.
Key words: gamma rays: bursts - cosmology: cosmological parameters - cosmology: distance scale
A class of very accurate standard candles, the supernovae Ia (SNeIa), has been highly developed in the last two decades (Branch & Tammann 1992); however, these objects are hardly detectable at redshifts higher than z = 1.7, so the study of more distant regions of the Universe leads to the needing to implement more powerful standard candles. The problem becomes particularly crucial at intermediate redshift, z = 6-7, where, up to now, not very well-defined distance indicators are available.
In the last years, several efforts have been made in order to implement gamma ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful explosions in the Universe, as standard candles, and several interesting results have recently been achieved (e.g. Amati et al. 2008; Basilakos & Perivolaropoulos 2008, and references therein). Considering the standard model of such objects, the GRB phenomenon should originate from the black hole formation and reach huge amounts of energy (up to 1054 erg). These events are observed at considerable distances, so there are several efforts to frame them into the standard of cosmological distance ladder.
In the literature, several more-detailed models give account
for the GRB formation, e.g. Meszaros (2006); Ruffini et al. (2008),
but, up to now, none of them is intrinsically capable of
connecting all the observable quantities. For this reason, GRBs
cannot be used as standard candles. Despite this shortcoming,
there are several observational correlations among the photometric
and spectral properties of GRBs. These features allow use of
GRBs as distance indicators (Schaefer 2007), even when they
cannot be fully ``enrolled'' in the class of standard candles. In
particular, it is possible to connect the peak energy of GRBs,
,
with the isotropic energy released in the burst,
,
and with the rest frame jet break-time of the afterglow optical
light curve, measured in days,
,
(Liang & Zhang 2005):
Another interesting result is the relation given by Ghirlanda et al. (2004).
It connects the peak energy
with the collimation-corrected energy, or the energy release of a GRB jet,
,
where
![]() |
(2) |
![]() |
(3) |
These two relations are used the most in constraining cosmology due to their relatively small scatter, interestingly very tight in the Ghirlanda et al. one, and the sufficient number of data points available.
In Schaefer (2007), an example of the discrepancy between data and theoretical curves is shown for these two relations. It is worth noticing that the calibration of the above relations is necessary to avoid the circularity problem: all the relations need to be calibrated for every set of cosmological parameters. Indeed, all GRB distances, obtained only in a photometric way, are strictly dependent on the cosmological parameters since there is no low-redshift set of GRBs to achieve a cosmology-independent calibration.
Recently, Liang et al. (2008) present a calibration method
(Liang thereafter) for several GRB relations, included the above
relations (1) and (4), in a
cosmology-independent way using the SNeIa. In fact, the SNeIa are
very accurate standard candles, but their range is limited up to
;
hence, assuming that relations (1) and (4) work at any z and that, at the same redshift,
GRBs and SNeIa have the same luminosity distance, it becomes
possible, in principle, to calibrate GRB relations at low
redshifts. The calibration parameters are shown in Table 1.
For the
-
-
relation, the b-values in the first
line is b1 and in the second line is b2.
Table 1: Parameter values obtained by Liang et al. (2008).
When our working-relations are calibrated with the Liang method,
we can compute the luminosity distance
from the well-known
relation between
and the energy-flux ratio of the distance
indicators in consideration. Afterwards, we can use a formulation
given by Visser (2004), where the luminosity distance
is related to the cosmographic parameters (Weinberg 1972)
by means of a Taylor series expansion for the same
.
Such an
analysis works very well at low and intermediate redshifts, since
very good classes of standard candles are available there.
Besides, it is useful to constrain alternative theories of
gravity, as shown in Capozziello et al. (2008). Since we are
calibrating GRBs by SNeIa (in the SNeIa redshift range, the
Taylor series analysis works very well), the method could also be
extended to the next step (intermediate-high redshifts) where
GRBs are expected to be suitable distance indicators. This working
hypothesis could be useful in order to link low and high redshift
ranges and then fully probe
.
However, it is clear that such
a Taylor expansion, derived for low redshifts, can be problematic
for fitting GRBs at high redshifts. Here, we consider it a viable
methodological approach to link GRBs to SNeIa.
The aim of this work is to achieve the cosmographic parameters
(Weinberg 1972) using the above GRB relations and then to test
the cosmological density parameters in a CDM model. The
only assumption that we make here is that the Universe is
described by a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker geometry and the scale
factor of the universe a(t) can be expanded in a Taylor series
(Sect. 2). In Sect. 3, after considering a sample of 27 GRBs, we use
a best-fit analysis to derive the cosmographic parameters discussed in
the previous section, adopting the so-called Chevallier,
Polarsky, Linder parameterization for the equation of state (EoS).
Discussion and conclusions are given in Sect. 4.
The calibration we want to achieve should be cosmologically model-independent; hence, applying the above relations to a GRB sample in a given z-range, we want to derive the related cosmography. In particular, we want to obtain deceleration, jerk, and snap parameters (Visser 2004) and compare them with the current values deduced by other methods and observations (see, for example, Basilakos & Perivolaropoulos 2008; Capozziello et al. 2008, and references therein).
Being only related to the derivatives of the scale factor allows to fit the cosmographic parameters versus the distance-redshift relation without any a priori assumption on the underlying cosmological model but, this fails at very high redshifts where the Taylor expansion does not work yet.
To build a distance-redshift diagram, one has to calculate the
luminosity distance for each GRB in a given sample. In our case
the luminosity distance is
The luminosity distance can be connected to the Hubble series
(Weinberg 1972). Expanding the Hubble law up to the fourth order
in redshift and considering the related luminosity distance, we
get (Visser 2004)
![]() |
= | ![]() |
|
![]() |
|||
![]() |
(8) |
H(t) | = | ![]() |
(9) |
q(t) | = | ![]() |
(10) |
j(t) | = | ![]() |
(11) |
s(t) | = | ![]() |
(12) |
Table 2: GRBs data sample.
The cosmographic parameters can be expressed in terms of the dark
energy density and the EoS. Following the prescriptions of the
Dark Energy Task Force, (Albrecht et al. 2006), we use the
Chevallier-Polarski-Linder parameterization (CPL) for the EoS
(Linder 2003; Chevallier et al. 2001) and assume a spatially flat Universe filled with
dust matter and dark energy. The dimensionless Hubble parameter
E(z) = H/H0 reads as
![]() |
(13) |
Let us take a GRB sample into account that satisfies the above
relations. Unfortunately only 27 GRBs have observed jet breaks in
the Schaefer sample (Schaefer 2007). The observational
quantities of GRBs to take into account, are listed in Table 2. The luminosity distance for each of the relations is given by Eqs. (6) and (7), and then we obtain a data distribution in the luminosity distance-redshift diagram
.
The errors on the data are only of a photometric
nature and, in a first analysis, we can exclude errors on the
redshift. For each GRB, we assume
and
,
(Frail et al. 2001).
Another version of the Hubble series can be used to improve the
data fit. If we consider the equation for the distance modulus,
![]() |
(20) |
The truncated polynomial used in the fits has the form
![]() |
(22) |
![]() |
(23) |
The fits can be used to estimate the deceleration and the jerk
parameters. The logarithmic fit is better for estimating the snap
parameter through the values of the coefficients ai and biand their statistical uncertainties. The statistical
uncertainties on q0 are linearly related to the statistical
uncertainties on the parameter b1, while the statistical
uncertainties on j0 and s0 depend non-linearly on q0and its statistical uncertainty. It is worth noticing the
combination
,
which is a well-known degeneracy
in Eq. (21) (Weinberg 1972). It means that we cannot
determine j0 and
separately, but we
need an independent determination of
to estimate the
value of the jerk parameter.
Table 3: Results of the fits. LZ is for Liang-Zhang relation, GGL for the Ghirlanda et al. one.
The results of the fits are presented in Table 3,
and all of them include the error on the data. For the calculation
of the uncertainties on ,
we have followed the procedure
discussed in Xu et al. (2005). For example, the fractional
uncertainties on
in the Ghirlanda et al. relation, without
the small angle approximation for
(Sari et al. 1999), are
given by
![]() |
= | ![]() |
|
![]() |
|||
![]() |
(24) |
As said above, only statistical uncertainties have been considered and other kinds of errors (systematics of cosmological inference, modelling errors and ``historical'' biases, Visser 2007b) have been neglected. If we do not assume H0 as a constraint, the analysis gives H0 = 56 km s-1 Mpc-1, which means that the data sample needs to be improved with further GRBs to give more reliable results.
Another step would be to test the goodness of the next fit
statistics using the MATLAB package. In particular, we used the
R-square method: a value closer to 1 indicates a better fit. In
Table 4, the results of R-square are shown and the
plots of the residuals of the fits are shown in Figs. 1, 2. For the logarithmic fit, the bad
value of the R-square is caused by the logarithm of the Hubble
series, which spreads a lot of the data on the
-axis. The
values
1 for the logarithmic fits are due to the
discrepancy of the data.
Table 4: Goodness of the fits with the R-square.
![]() |
Figure 1:
Luminosity distance-redshift diagram and the residuals
of the
![]() ![]() |
Open with DEXTER |
In summary, the results are in quite good agreement with the
CDM model, giving a Universe model that accelerates in
the present epoch and that has undergone a decelerated phase in
the past. The signature of this past phase is related to the sign
change of the parameter q0 and the positive value of the jerk
parameter, unless a positive value of the spatial curvature
constant k is considered. However this occurrence is excluded by
the last observational results, which confirm a spatially flat
Universe (Komatsu et al. 2008).
![]() |
Figure 2:
Logarithmic version of the luminosity distance relation
versus redshift and the residuals of the
![]() ![]() |
Open with DEXTER |
As said, the cosmographic parameters may also be expressed in
terms of the dark energy density and EoS parameters. Starting from
the Friedmann equation, we obtain the Hubble parameter:
![]() |
(25) |
![]() |
(26) |
![]() |
(27) |
![]() |
(28) |
Starting from some relations connecting the observable quantities of GRBs, we have used a sample of 27 GRBs to derive the luminosity distance-redshift diagram of the Hubble law. The relations conveniently calibrated by SNeIa to make them independent of any cosmological models.
We have taken the Hubble law into account in the Taylor series
form, assuming the luminosity distance
as a redshift
function whose coefficients are combinations of the cosmographic
parameters H0, q0, j0, and s0. The aim was to evaluate
such parameters starting from the GRB data. A direct analysis of
the fits leads to the conclusion that, in the error range, the
SNeIa results can also be extended at higher redshifts
(Visser 2007b). Besides, such results agree with the
CDM
model according to Eqs. (17)-(19). In particular, the
value of the parameter q0 that we found is in agreement with
the observed
(see Table 5).
Table 5: Cosmological density parameters.
However, the sample we used is quite poor at high redshifts and,
in some sense, this justifies the use of the method of Taylor
series which works very well at low redshifts. In particular, at
z > 6, we only have one GRB, GRB050904 (see Fig.
1). This GRB is very important in the fit results
because it affects the trend of the fits. For this reason we need
some richer sample at medium-high redshifts to constrain the
results better. However, if we had richer samples at high
redshifts, the Taylor series analysis would fail to constrain
cosmological models since an exact, and not approximated,
expression is needed in that case. The best constraint, however,
would be an absolute relation between several, GRB observables
which would make the GRBs a powerful standard candle at
intermediate-high redshift.
Considering these preliminary results, it seems that cosmography by GRBs could be a useful tool in constraining self-consistent cosmological models even if, up to now, GRBs are not standard candles in the proper sense.
Acknowledgements
We thank the referee for the useful suggestions that improved the paper.