Local Rate of Short-hard Gamma-ray Bursts and Their Progenitor Lifetimes

Gamma-ray bursts have been divided into two classes, long-soft gamma-ray bursts (L-GRBs) and short-hard gamma-ray bursts (SHBs) according to the bimodal distribution in the duration time. Due to the harder spectrum and the lack of afterglows of short-hard bursts in optical and radio observations, different progenitors for short-hard bursts and long-soft bursts have been suggested. Based on the X-ray afterglow observation and the cumulative red-shift distribution of short-hard bursts. Nakar et al. (2006) found that the progenitors of short-hard bursts are consistent with old populations, such as mergers of binary neutron stars. Recently, the existence of two subclasses in long-soft bursts has been suggested after considering multiple characteristics of gamma-ray bursts, including fluences and duration times. In this work, we extended the analysis of the cumulative red-shift distribution to two possible subclasses in L-GRBs. We found that two possible subclass GRBs show different red-shift distributions, especially for red-shifts z > 1. Our results indicate that the accumulative red-shift distribution can be used as a tool to constrain the progenitor characteristics of possible subclasses in L-GRBs.