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Discovery and identification of the very high redshift afterglow of GRB 050904

Discovery and identification of the very high redshift afterglow of GRB 050904. P. Price (U. of Hawaii) and many others. J. B. Haislip, et al. astro-ph 0509660, submitted to Nature.

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Discovery and identification of the very high redshift afterglow of GRB 050904

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  1. Discovery and identification of the very high redshiftafterglow of GRB 050904 P. Price (U. of Hawaii) and many others J. B. Haislip, et al. astro-ph 0509660, submitted to Nature.

  2. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and their afterglows were predicted in 2000 to occur in sufficient numbers and at sufficient brightnesses at very high redshifts (z > 5) to eventually replace quasars as probes of the early universe. In particular GRBs can provide insight for studies of element formation and reionization and the star-formation history of the early universe, perhaps back to when the first stars formed. The IRTF has a target of opportunity proposal to observe GRBs in the infrared. The proposed work on the IRTF is to obtain L-band photometry on sources that are bright enough, since the IRTF is one of the few telescopes with L-band capability. Reported here, however, is K-band photometry of the first high-z GRB that was part of world-wide observations.

  3. What Makes a GRB? The progenitors of at least some (most?) long/soft GRBs are massive stars that explode as a SN, with a variety of peak brightness.

  4. The Swift Spacecraft Swift has three instruments: the X-ray Telescope, the Ultraviolet/ Optical Telescope, and the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT). The first two instruments have co-aligned field-of-view so that any source detected by BAT can be observed in all three wavebands simultaneously within 200 seconds. Positional information is provided to the ground as soon as a burst is detected. For more info: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/spacecraft/

  5. Images of GRB 050904 Figure 1. Left panel: Near-infrared discovery image of the bright (J =17.36 mag) afterglow of GRB 050904 from the SOAR telescope. Middle panel: Near-simultaneous non-detection of the afterglow at visible wavelengths (Rc > 20.1 mag) from one of the six PROMPT telescopes atop Cerro Tololo. Right panel: Color composite (riz) image of the afterglow 3.2 days after the burst from 8.1-m Gemini South.

  6. Photometric Redshift Figure 2. Spectral flux distribution of the afterglow of GRB 050904 scaled to 10.6 hours after the burst and a best-fit model. The sharp drop at wavelengths < 0.91 micron (frequency >10^14.52 Hz) is used to obtain a photometric redshift of 6.28. Data from PROMPT, Calar Alto, SOAR, 60 inch Palomar, UKIRT, IRTF, UKIRT, and Gemini South.

  7. Conclusions • Photometric redshift for GRB 050904 is z = 6.4 +/- 0.1 (spectroscopic measurement from Subaru was 6.29) • We expect more high-redshift GRBs to come from Swift • NIR observations of the afterglow are essential for identifyinghigh-redshift GRBs; IRTF can play a strong role.

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