Unification of Pulses in Long and Short Gamma-Ray Bursts: Evidence from Pulse Properties and their Correlations

Abstract

We demonstrate that distinguishable gamma-ray burst pulses exhibit similar behaviors as evidenced by correlations among the observable pulse properties of duration, peak luminosity, fluence, spectral hardness, energy-dependent lag, and asymmetry. Long and Short burst pulses exhibit these behaviors, suggesting that a similar process is responsible for producing all GRB pulses. That these properties correlate in the observer's frame indicates that intrinsic correlations are strong enough to not be diluted into insignificance by the dispersion in distances and redshift. We show how all correlated pulse characteristics can be explained by hard-to-soft pulse evolution, and we demonstrate that "intensity tracking" pulses not having these properties are not single pulses; they instead appear to be composed of two or more overlapping hard-to-soft pulses. In order to better understand pulse characteristics, we recognize that hard-to-soft evolution provides a more accurate definition of a pulse than its intensity variation. This realization, coupled with the observation that pulses begin near-simultaneously across a wide range of energies, leads us to conclude that the observed pulse emission represents the energy decay resulting from an initial injection, and that one simple and as yet unspecified physical mechanism is likely to be responsible for all gamma-ray burst pulses regardless of the environment in which they form and, if GRBs originate from different progenitors, then of the progenitors that supply them with energy.