Are γ-ray bursts better star formation tracers than supernovae?

✍ Scribed by E. Le Floc'h

• Book ID: 103851640
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 177 KB
• Volume: 48
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1387-6473
• DOI: 10.1016/j.newar.2003.12.049

✦ Synopsis

Since the breakthrough operated in 1997 by the Beppo-SAX satellite and the subsequent opening of the ''afterglow'' era, it has been widely claimed that the cosmological long-duration c-ray bursts (GRBs) may represent an ideal tool to probe the global history of star formation in our Universe. GRBs, which are likely detectable up to very high redshifts and do not suffer from dust extinction, seem indeed to originate from the death of short-lived massive stars, and may thus trace the distant star-forming activity without the usual biases inherent to the deep survey approach.

However, the currently known sample of galaxies hosting the GRBs does not seem to be accurately representative of the whole ensemble of high redshift star-forming galaxies. I discuss various reasons to explain such an issue, and describe the perspectives for future work in this subject.