BATSE burst location accuracy and constraints on the fraction of repeating GRB sources

Conference · Fri Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 1994 · AIP Conference Proceedings (American Institute of Physics); (United States)

OSTI ID:6818863

Strohmayer, T E; Fenimore, E E ^[1]; Miralles, J A ^[2]

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1. Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS D436, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 (United States)
2. Department de Fisica Teorica, University de Valencia, 46100 Burjassot (Spain)

We use extensive simulations of GRB source repetition to investigate the ability of BATSE to detect source repetition and to place constraints on the fraction of repeating sources. From Monte Carlo simulations we find that the current uncertainty in BATSE burst locations severely limits our ability to confidently detect source repetition from distribution containing fewer than 10--15% repeaters. A fit of our repetition model to 260 BATSE catalog bursts yields a best-fit repeating fraction of [ital f][sub r]=21% with a 90% confidence region ranging from 5.5 to 32.5%. By modifying the size of the measurement errors in our simulations we show that the location and width of the confidence region depends sensitively on the burst location errors. With BATSE's present location accuracy analysis of larger samples of bursts will not appreciably improve the constraint on the repeating fraction.

• OSTI ID: 6818863
• Report Number(s): CONF-9310252--
• Conference Information: Journal Name: AIP Conference Proceedings (American Institute of Physics); (United States) Journal Volume: 307:1
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

661300* -- Other Aspects of Physical Science-- (1992-)
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
CALCULATION METHODS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
CONSTRAINTS
COSMIC GAMMA BURSTS
COSMIC RADIATION
DATA ANALYSIS
DISTRIBUTION
ERRORS
IONIZING RADIATIONS
MONTE CARLO METHOD
PRIMARY COSMIC RADIATION
RADIATIONS
SIMULATION
SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION
TIMING PROPERTIES