3:30–4:00 pm ERC 545
Host: Alexander Ji
Anya Nugent (Northwestern) "Characterizing the Host Environments of Short GRBs: From the Ultra Faint to the Highest-Redshift"
Short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs; z~0.1-3), originate from neutron star mergers, and are thus directly connected to the local population of gravitational wave (GW) mergers. Host galaxy studies of these events are imperative to determine their environmental conditions for formation, merger timescales, and pre-merger binary properties. As SGRBs are both detected and associated with host galaxies far more frequently than GW events and extend to much further redshifts, their host population currently provides the most information on the formation and evolution of these systems. Here, I discuss building the largest catalog of SGRB host galaxy observations and stellar population properties, including redshifts, stellar masses, ages, metallicities and star formation rates. To understand how NS mergers depend on their environment over cosmic time, I showcase the SGRB host stellar populations in the context of the field galaxy population and compare to well-known galaxy relations. I further present a population of ultra-faint SGRB hosts which thus far had unknown redshifts and luminosities, but provide strong discriminating power on their delay time distributions and chemical enrichment of the Universe. I conclude by discussing recent results to measure their stellar mass and redshifts.
