A new luminosity relation for gamma-ray bursts and its implication

Abstract

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous astrophysical events observed so far. They are conventionally classified into long and short ones depending on their time duration, $T_{90}$. Because of the advantage their high redshifts offer, many efforts have been made to apply GRBs to cosmology. The key to this is to find correlations between some measurable properties of GRBs and the energy or the luminosity of GRBs. These correlations are usually referred to as luminosity relations and are helpful in understanding the GRBs themselves. In this paper, we explored such correlations in the X-ray emission of GRBs. The X-ray emission of GRBs observed by \emph{Swift} has the exponential functional form in the prompt phase and relaxes to a power-law decay at time $T_p$. We have assumed a linear relation between $\log L_{X, p}$ (with $L_{X, p}$ being the X-ray luminosity at $T_p$) and $\log [T_p/(1+z)]$, but there is some evidence for curvature in the data and the true relationship between $L_{X, p}$ and $T_p/(1+z)$ may be a broken power law. The limited GRB sample used in our analysis is still not sufficient for us to conclude whether the break is real or just an illusion caused by outliers. We considered both cases in our analysis and discussed the implications of the luminosity relation, especially on the time duration of GRBs and their classification.