J. Gorosabel et al., A BATSE-BASED SEARCH FOR REPEATERS IN THE SAMPLE OF GAMMA-RAY BURSTS DETECTED BY THE WATCH EXPERIMENT, Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin), 336(1), 1998, pp. 57-62
This study is the first known attempt to search for gamma-ray burst re
peaters combining data from gamma-ray experiments flying on board diff
erent satellites and making use of information derived from the bursts
detected simultaneously by all the experiments. The proposed method i
s suitable to correlate GRB data provided by experiments that overlap
partially or totally in time. As an application of this method we have
correlated the positions of 57 gamma-ray bursts observed by WATCH/GRA
NAT and WATCH/EURECA with 1905 bursts detected by BATSE. Comparing the
so-called ''added correlation'' between the WATCH and BATSE bursts wi
th that obtained with simulated WATCH catalogues, we conclude that the
re is no indication of recurrent activity of WATCH bursts in the BATSE
sample. We derive an upper limit of 15.8%, with a confidence level of
94%, for the number of WATCH gamma-ray bursts that could represent a
population of repeaters in the BATSE sample.