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American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 2(745), p. 168, 2012

DOI: 10.1088/0004-637x/745/2/168

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Selection Effects on the Observed Redshift Dependence of Gamma-Ray Burst Jet Opening Angles

Journal article published in 2012 by Rui-Jing Lu, Jun-Jie Wei ORCID, Shu-Fu Qin, and En-Wei Liang
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

An apparent redshift dependence of the jet opening angles (θj) of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is observed from the current GRB sample. We investigate whether this dependence can be explained with instrumental selection effects and observational biases by a bootstrapping method. Assuming that (1) the GRB rate follows the star formation history and the cosmic metallicity history and (2) the intrinsic distributions of the jet-corrected luminosity (L γ) and θj are a Gaussian or a power-law function, we generate a mock Swift/Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) sample by considering various instrumental selection effects, including the flux threshold and the trigger probability of BAT, the probabilities of a GRB jet pointing to the instrument solid angle, and the probability of redshift measurement. Our results reproduce the observed θj – z dependence well. We find that in the case of L γθ2 j good consistency between the mock and observed samples can be obtained, indicating that both L γ and θj are degenerate for a flux-limited sample. The parameter set (L γ, θj) = (4.9 × 1049 erg s–1, 0.054 rad) gives the best consistency for the current Swift GRB sample. Considering the beaming effect, the derived intrinsic local GRB rate is accordingly 2.85 × 102 Gpc–3 yr–1, inferring that ~0.59% of Type Ib/c supernovae may be accompanied by a GRB.