A Principal Component Analysis of the 3B Gamma-Ray Burst Data

We have carried out a principal component analysis for 625 gamma-ray bursts in the BATSE 3B catalog for which non-zero values exist for the nine measured variables. This shows that only two out of the three basic quantities of duration, peak flux and fluence are independent, even if this relation is strongly affected by instrumental effects, and these two account for 91.6% of the total information content. The next most important variable is the fluence in the fourth energy channel (at energies above 320 keV). This has a larger variance and is less correlated with the fluences in the remaining three channels than the latter correlate among themselves. Thus a separate consideration of the fourth channel, and increased attention on the related hardness ratio $H43$ appears useful for future studies. The analysis gives the weights for the individual measurements needed to define a single duration, peak flux and fluence. It also shows that, in logarithmic variables, the hardness ratio $H32$ is significantly correlated with peak flux, while $H43$ is significantly anticorrelated with peak flux. The principal component analysis provides a potentially useful tool for estimating the improvement in information content to be achieved by considering alternative variables or performing various corrections on available measurementsComment: Ap.J., accepted 12/9/97; revised version contains a new appendix, somewhat expanded discussion; latex, aaspp4, 15 page

Properties of the intermediate type of gamma-ray bursts

Gamma-ray bursts can be divided into three groups ("short", "intermediate", "long") with respect to their durations. The third type of gamma-ray bursts - as known - has the intermediate duration. We show that the intermediate group is the softest one. An anticorrelation between the hardness and the duration is found for this subclass in contrast to the short and long groups.Comment: In Sixteenth Maryland Astrophysics Conferenc

On the large-scale angular distribution of short-Gamma ray bursts

We investigate the large-scale angular distribution of the short-Gamma ray bursts (SGRBs) from BATSE experiment, using a new coordinates-free method. The analyses performed take into account the angular correlations induced by the non-uniform sky exposure during the experiment, and the uncertainty in the measured angular coordinates. Comparising the large-scale angular correlations from the data with those expected from simulations using the exposure function we find similar features. Additionally, confronting the large-angle correlations computed from the data with those obtained from simulated maps produced under the assumption of statistical isotropy we found that they are incompatible at 95% confidence level. However, such differences are restricted to the angular scales 36o - 45o, which are likely to be due to the non-uniform sky exposure. This result strongly suggests that the set of SGRBs from BATSE are intrinsically isotropic. Moreover, we also investigated a possible large-angle correlation of these data with the supergalactic plane. No evidence for such large-scale anisotropy was found.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, 6 pages, 3 figure