An Optical Gamma-Ray Burst catalogue with Measured Redshift: Data Release of 533 Gamma-Ray Bursts and colour evolution
Speaker: Biagio De Simone
Abstract:
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are incredibly energetic cosmic phenomena observed across a wide range of wavelengths, including gamma-ray and optical frequencies, and occasionally even in radio waves. They allow extending the Hubble diagram and the cosmological analysis up to redshift z=9.4, much further than Supernovae Ia (z=2.26).
We therefore present a compilation of 533 optical lightcurves (LCs) of all GRBs with measured redshifts, detected mainly by Swift and 418 ground-based telescopes from February 28, 1997, to April 14, 2023. This catalogue is the largest optical repository of GRB LCs with redshifts to date, with 64615 photometric data points, including upper limits. Our user-friendly web tool, grbLC, allows the acquisition of GRB LCs, including information on the position, redshift, and a Gamma-ray Coordinates Network (GCN) crawler that can be used to collect data by gathering magnitudes from the GCNs. The web tool also includes a package for uniformly investigating colour evolution. We have crafted a procedure to distinguish between GRBs in our sample, which undergo colour evolution, and GRBs for which no colour evolution is present. We compared our results with the literature. This web-based archive is the first step towards unifying several community efforts to gather optical LCs by providing a unified format and repository for the optical catalogue. This catalogue will enable population studies by providing LCs with better coverage since we have gathered data from different ground-based locations, resulting in fewer gaps in the LCs and representing crucial support for the LC reconstructions analysis.