Temporal properties of short GRBs

Abstract

We analyze a sample of bright short bursts from the BATSE 4B-catalog and find that many short bursts are highly variable ($δt_{min}/T\ll 1$, where $δt_{min}$ is the shortest pulse duration and T is the burst duration). This indicates that it is unlikely that short bursts are produced by external shocks. We also analyze the available (first 1-2 seconds) high resolution (TTE) data of some of the long bursts. We find that variability on a 10ms time-scale is common in long bursts. This result shows that some long bursts are even more variable than it was thought before ($δt_{min}/T\approx 10^{-4}-10^{-3}$ )

7 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication by MNRAS