THE PEAK ENERGY-DURATION CORRELATION AND POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS ON GAMMA RAY BURST PROGENITOR

We investigate the correlation between the peak energy and the burst duration using available long GRB data with known redshift, whose circumburst medium type has been suggested via afterglow light curve modeling. We find that the peak energy and the burst duration of the observed GRBs are correlated both in the observer frame and in the GRB rest frame. For our total sample we obtain, for instance, the Spearman rank-order correlation values ${\sim}0.75\;and\;{\sim}0.65$ with the chance probabilities $P=1.0{\times}10^{-3}\;and\;P=6.0{\times}10^{-3}$ in the observer frame and in the GRB rest frame, respectively. We note that taking the effects of the expanding universe into account reduces the value a bit. We further attempt to separate our GRB sample into the 'ISM' GRBs and the 'WIND' GRBs according to environment models inferred from the afterglow light curves and apply statistical tests, as one may expect that clues on the progenitor of GRBs can be deduced directly from prompt emission properties other than from the ambient environment surrounding GRBs. We find that two subsamples of GRBs show different correlation coefficients. That is, the Spearman rank-order correlation are ${\sim}0.65\;and\;{\sim}0.57$ for the 'ISM' GRBs and 'WIND' GRBs, respectively, after taking the effects of the expanding universe into account. It is not yet, however, statistically very much significant that the GRBS in two types of circumburst media show statistically characteristic behaviors, from which one may conclude that all the long bursts are not originated from a single progenitor population. A larger size of data is required to increase the statistical significance.