Are short Gamma Ray Bursts similar to long ones?

Abstract

The apparent separation of short and long Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) in the hardness ratio vs duration plot has been considered as a direct evidence of the difference between these two populations. The origin of this diversity, however, has been only confirmed with larger GRB samples but not fully understood. In particular, the hardness ratio is only a proxy of the shape of the spectra of GRBs and itself, together with the observed duration, does not consider the possible different redshift distribution of short and long bursts, which might arise from their different progenitors' nature. By correcting the spectral shape of short and long GRBs for the redshift effects, short GRBs are harder than long ones due to a harder low energy spectral component while the two populations have similar (rest frame) peak energy. In the rest frame, the temporal break of the long/short duration distribution is blurred away and short and long GRBs have a continuous differential duration distribution. Moreover, they show similar luminosities but their energetics differ by a factor proportional to their different average duration. The spectral evolution of long GRBs shows that the initial phase (of the order of 0.3 s rest frame) has similar spectral properties of that of short GRBs. As a consequence, the different hardness at low energies might be due to a prolonged spectral evolution of long GRBs with respect to short ones. Finally, we show that long GRBs can have a null lag similarly to short bursts. Moreover, we find that a considerable fraction of long (and most of short) GRBs are inconsistent with the lag-luminosity relation which could be a boundary in the corresponding plane, rather than a correlation.