Astrophysics Comparison between Swift and pre-Swift gamma-ray bursts

Abstract The gamma-ray burst (GRB) mission Swift has made a much deeper GRB survey than any previous one. I present a systematical comparison between GRB samples detected with pre-Swift missions and those from Swift, in order to investigate whether they show any statistical difference. Our Swift GRB sample includes the bursts detected by Swift/BAT before 2007 September. With both flux-limited surveys and redshift-known GRB samples, I show that, apparently, the observed distributions of the redshifts, T 90, and logN−logP are significantly different, but not for the spectral hardness ratio, fluence and Eiso. The redshifts of the Swift GRB sample are statistically larger than those of pre-Swift GRBs, with a mean of 1.95±0.17 compared to ∼ 1 for pre-Swift GRBs. The cosmological effect on the observables is thus considerable. This effect on the spectral hardness ratio, fluence and Eiso is cancelled out, and the distributions of these quantities indeed do not show significant differences between the Swift and pre-Swift GRBs. Taking this effect into account, I found that the corrected distributions of T 90 for long GRBs and logN − logP observed with Swift/BAT are also consistent with those observed with CGRO/BATSE. These results indicate that the Swift and pre-Swift GRBs are from the same population. Key words: gamma-rays: bursts