The GRB Intrinsic Duration Distribution: Progenitor Insights Across Cosmic Time

Abstract

We present the distribution of the intrinsic duration of gamma-ray bursts' prompt emission. This expands upon the analysis of Bromberg et al., 2012 and Bromberg et al. 2013 who showed evidence for collapsar progenitors based on the presence of a plateau in the distribution of $T_{90}$, the duration over which 90 % of the prompt emission is observed for any given detector. We confirm the presence of this plateau in the distribution of duration corrected for cosmological time dilation (what we call intrinsic duration, $T_{int}$), but shifted to smaller timescales by a factor of $1/(1+z_{\rm av}) \sim 1/3$, where $z_{\rm av}$ is the average GRB redshift. More significantly, we show this plateau is only present in the sample of GRBs with redshifts greater than $(1+z) \sim 2$, and does not appear in the duration distribution of lower redshift GRBs. This result aligns with suggestions that the low redshift population of GRBs has a significant contribution from non-collapsar progenitors (while the high redshift sample is dominated by collapsars). We also show the difference in this distribution between spectrally hard and soft GRBs, confirming that a plateau is only present for the soft subset of GRBs. However, when we separate the soft GRBs into low and high redshift subsets, we find that only the high redshift soft GRBs show evidence of a plateau, while the low-redshift soft GRBs do not. This suggests there exists a significant subset of spectrally soft non-collapsar progenitors at low redshift. Finally, we use the end time of the plateau to constrain the GRB progenitor density profile and radius, and show the maximum size of a collapsar is a few tenths of a solar radius.