SURVIVAL ANALYSIS OF THE GAMMA-RAY BURST DATA

Gamma-ray bursts are short but powerful pulses of electromagnetic radi ation coming from space. Specially equipped satellites have observed t he arrival of several hundred bursts during the past two decades. The origin of these bursts, whether from near the earth, across the galaxy , or out of the deep cosmos, has become a major question for astronome rs. At the heart of this question lies a statistical puzzle relating t o familiar issues in survival analysis: Kaplan-Meier-type curves, data truncation, hazard rate analysis, Mantel-Haenszel statistics, and so on. Survival analysis is used here to critically examine two different models that have been proposed for the gamma-ray burst data. The anal ysis contradicts one of these models.