Revisiting the long/soft-short/hard classification of gamma-ray bursts in the Fermi era

Abstract

We perform a statistical analysis of the temporal and spectral properties of the latest Fermi gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to revisit the classification of GRBs. We find that the bimodalities of duration and the energy ratio (E peak/Fluence) and the anti-correlation between spectral hardness (hardness ratio (HR), peak energy, and spectral index) and duration (T 90) support the long/soft-short/hard classification scheme for Fermi GRBs. The HR-T 90 anti-correlation strongly depends on the spectral shape of GRBs and energy bands, and the bursts with the curved spectra in the typical BATSE energy bands show a tighter anti-correlation than those with the power-law spectra in the typical BAT energy bands. This might explain why the HR-T 90 correlation is not evident for those GRB samples detected by instruments like Swift with a narrower/softer energy bandpass. We also analyze the intrinsic energy correlation for the GRBs with measured redshifts and well-defined peak energies. The current sample suggests E p, rest = 2455 × (E iso/1052)0.59 for short GRBs, significantly different from that for long GRBs. However, both the long and short GRBs comply with the same E p, rest-L iso correlation. © 2012 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.