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Published August 5, 2004 | Submitted
Journal Article Open

The sub-energetic big γ-ray burst GRB 031203 as a cosmic analogue to the nearby GRB 980425

Abstract

Over the six years since the discovery of the γ-ray burst GRB 980425, which was associated with the nearby (distance ~40 Mpc) supernova 1998bw, astronomers have debated fiercely the nature of this event. Relative to bursts located at cosmological distance (redshift z approximately 1), GRB 980425 was under-luminous in gamma-rays by three orders of magnitude. Radio calorimetry showed that the explosion was sub-energetic by a factor of 10. Here we report observations of the radio and X-ray afterglow of the recent GRB 031203 (refs 5–7), which has a redshift of z = 0.105. We demonstrate that it too is sub-energetic which, when taken together with the low gamma-ray luminosity, suggests that GRB 031203 is the first cosmic analogue to GRB 980425. We find no evidence that this event was a highly collimated explosion viewed off-axis. Like GRB 980425, GRB 031203 appears to be an intrinsically sub-energetic gamma-ray burst. Such sub-energetic events have faint afterglows. We expect intensive follow-up of faint bursts with smooth gamma-ray light curves (common to both GRB 031203 and 980425) to reveal a large population of such events.

Additional Information

© 2004 Nature Publishing Group. Received 25 March; accepted 15 June 2004. GRB research at Caltech is supported in part by NSF and NASA. We are indebted to S. Barthelmy and the GCN. The VLA is operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. A.M.S. is supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship. A.G. acknowledges support by NASA through a Hubble fellowship grant.

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August 22, 2023
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