The Extent of the Spectral Bias in BATSE: The True Distribution of the nu F_nu Peak Energy

Abstract

The distributions of spectral characteristics and their correlations with fluence, peak flux, or duration, are essential in understanding the nature of GRBs. However, the selection effects involved in detecting GRBs can distort these distributions. Here, we discuss how to deal with selection effects involving the peak energy E_p of the GRB nu F_nu spectrum, which suffers from both an upper and lower threshold. We describe a new method to account for this double-sided truncation, and show that the true distribution of E_p is significantly different from the observed distribution.Comment: 5 pages, 3 postscript figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 4th Huntsville Gamma Ray Burst Symposium, C.A.Meegan, P.Cushman, ed