Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b

@article{Bloom2005ClosingIO,
  title={Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b},
  author={Joshua S. Bloom and J. Xavier Prochaska and David Pooley and Cullen H. Blake and Ryan J. Foley and Saurabh W. Jha and Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and Johnathan Granot and Alexei V. Filippenko and Steinn Sigurdsson and Aaron J. Barth and H.-W. Chen and Michael C. Cooper and Emilio E. Falco and R. R. Gal and Brian Francis Gerke and Michael D. Gladders and Jenny E. Greene and J. Hennanwi and Luis C. Ho and Kevin Hurley and Benjamin P. Koester and Weidong Li and Lori M. Lubin and Jeffrey A. Newman and Daniel A. Perley and Gordon K. Squires and William Michael Wood-Vasey},
  journal={The Astrophysical Journal},
  year={2005},
  volume={638},
  pages={354-368}
}
The localization of the short-duration, hard-spectrum gamma-ray burst GRB 050509b by the Swift satellite was a watershed event. We report the discovery of the probable host galaxy, a bright elliptical galaxy at z = 0.2248. This is the first known redshift and host of a short-hard GRB and shows that at least some short-hard GRBs are cosmological in origin. We began imaging the GRB field 8 minutes after the burst and continued for 8 days. We present a reanalysis of the XRT afterglow and report… Expand
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