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Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2(448), p. 1494-1503

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv088

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Far-infrared observations of an unbiased sample of gamma-ray burst host galaxies

Journal article published in 2015 by Saul A. Kohn, M. J. Micha owski, Michal J. Michałowski, Nathan Bourne, Maarten Baes ORCID, Jacopo Fritz, Asantha Cooray, I. de Looze, Ilse De Looze, Gianfranco De Zotti, Helmut Dannerbauer, Loretta Dunne, Simon Dye ORCID, Stephen Anthony Eales, Cristina Furlanetto ORCID and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most energetic phenomena in the Universe; believed to result from the collapse and subsequent explosion of massive stars. Even though it has profound consequences for our understanding of their nature and selection biases, little is known about the dust properties of the galaxies hosting GRBs. We present analysis of the far-infrared properties of an unbiased sample of 20 \textit{BeppoSAX} and \textit{Swift} GRB host galaxies (at an average redshift of $z\,=\,3.1$) located in the {\it Herschel} Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey, the {\it Herschel} Virgo Cluster Survey, the {\it Herschel} Fornax Cluster Survey, the {\it Herschel} Stripe 82 Survey and the {\it Herschel} Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey, totalling $880$ deg$^2$, or $∼ 3$\% of the sky in total. Our sample selection is serendipitous, based only on whether the X-ray position of a GRB lies within a large-scale {\it Herschel} survey -- therefore our sample can be considered completely unbiased. Using deep data at wavelengths of 100\,--\,500$\,μ$m, we tentatively detected 1 out of 20 GRB hosts located in these fields. We constrain their dust masses and star formation rates (SFRs), and discuss these in the context of recent measurements of submillimetre galaxies and ultraluminous infrared galaxies. The average far-infrared flux of our sample gives an upper limit on SFR of $500\,{\rm M}⊙\,\mbox{yr}^{-1}$ is consistent with the contribution of such luminous galaxies to the cosmic star formation density. ; Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables; accepted by MNRAS, updated TeX to match version in press