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Session 78 - Unique Objects and Gamma Bursts.
Oral session, Thursday, June 13
Historical Society,
Using a new analysis method, we search for narrow energy band, short-lived flares in gamma-ray bursts. Gamma-ray burst spectra are observed to be non-thermal but if the sources are located at cosmological distances, basic fireball models predict thermal spectra. These models are still viable if there are several thermal regions which become optically thin at different times and apparent temperatures giving rise to an apparently non-thermal spectrum. We use time-tagged count data from the BATSE Spectroscopy Detectors to determine the probability that any pair of counts came from the same energy band. If burst spectra are composed of many short duration black bodies, the average correlation between counts should be larger when the counts are separated by small time intervals. We discuss how the correlation between counts is calculated and apply this method to many short gamma-ray bursts.
