THE ANGULAR POWER SPECTRUM OF BATSE 3B GAMMA-RAY BURSTS

We compute the angular power spectrum C-1 from the BATSE 3B catalog of 1122 gamma-ray bursts and find no evidence for clustering on any scal e. These constraints bridge the entire range from small scales (which probe source clustering and burst repetition) to the largest scales (w hich constrain possible anisotropies from the Galactic halo or from ne arby cosmological large-scale structures). We develop an analysis tech nique that takes the angular position errors into account. For specifi c clustering or repetition models, strong upper limits can be obtained down to scales l similar to 30, corresponding to a couple of degrees on the sky. The minimum-variance burst weighting that we employ is vis ualized graphically as an all-sky map in which each burst is smeared o ut by an amount corresponding to its position uncertainty. We also pre sent separate bandpass-filtered sky maps for the quadrupole term and f or the multipole ranges l = 3-10 and I = 11-30, so that the fluctuatio ns on different angular scales can be inspected separately for visual features such as localized ''hot spots'' or structures aligned with th e Galactic plane. These filtered maps reveal no apparent deviations fr om isotropy.