Bibcode
Elliott, J.; Khochfar, S.; Greiner, J.; Dalla Vecchia, C.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 446, Issue 4, p.4239-4249
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2
2015
Citations
15
Refereed citations
14
Description
Long gamma-ray burst's (LGRB's) association with the death of massive
stars suggests that they could be used to probe the cosmic star
formation history (CSFH) with high accuracy, due to their high
luminosities. We utilize cosmological simulations from the First Billion
Years project to investigate the biases between the CSFH and the LGRB
rate at z > 5, assuming various different models and constraints on
the progenitors of LGRBs. We populate LGRBs using a selection based on
environmental properties and demonstrate that the LGRB rate should trace
the CSFH to high redshifts. The measured LGRB rate suggests that LGRBs
have opening angles of θjet = 0.1°, although the
degeneracy with the progenitor model cannot rule out an underlying bias.
We demonstrate that proxies that relate the LGRB rate with global LGRB
host properties do not reflect the underlying LGRB environment, and are
in fact a result of the host galaxy's spatial properties, such that
LGRBs can exist in galaxies of solar metallicity. However, we find a
class of host galaxies that have low stellar mass and are metal rich,
and that their metallicity dispersions would not allow low-metallicity
environments. Detection of hosts with this set of properties would
directly reflect the progenitor's environment. We predict that 10 per
cent of LGRBs per year are associated with this set of galaxies that
would have forbidden line emission that could be detected by instruments
on the James Webb Space Telescope. Such a discovery would place strong
constraints on the collapsar model and suggests other avenues to be
investigated.
Related projects
Numerical Astrophysics: Galaxy Formation and Evolution
How galaxies formed and evolved through cosmic time is one of the key questions of modern astronomy and astrophysics. Cosmological time- and length-scales are so large that the evolution of individual galaxies cannot be directly observed. Only through numerical simulations can one follow the emergence of cosmic structures within the current
Claudio
Dalla Vecchia