P. Tamblyn et F. Melia, RECONCILIATION OF THE DISPARATE GAMMA-RAY BURST CATALOGS IN THE CONTEXT OF A COSMOLOGICAL SOURCE DISTRIBUTION, The Astrophysical journal, 417(1), 1993, pp. 120000021-120000024
It is well-known that gamma-ray burst spectra often display a break at
energies less than or similar 400 keV, with some exceptions extending
to several MeV. Modeling of a cosmological source population is thus
nontrivial when comparing the catalogs from instruments with different
energy windows since this spectral structure is redshifted across the
trigger channels at varying levels of sensitivity. We here include th
is important effect in an attempt to reconcile all the available data
sets and show that a model in which bursts have a ''standard'' spectra
l break at 300 keV and occur in a population uniformly distributed in
a q0 = 1/2 universe with no evolution can account very well for the co
mbined set of observations. We show that the source population cannot
be truncated at a minimum redshift z(min) beyond approximately 0.1, an
d suggest that a simple follow-on instrument to BATSE, with. the same
trigger window, no directionality and 18 times better sensitivity migh
t be able to distinguish between a q0 = 0.1 and a q0 = 0.5 universe in
3 years of full sky coverage, provided the source population has no l
uminosity evolution.