The BurstCube Mission and the Classification of Gamma-Ray Burst Progenitors
Open Access DepositedGamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the brightest known transient class in the visible universe. The goals of this thesis were to study what properties might be useful in differentiating the progenitors of these objects and to develop an instrument to study GRBs. This dissertation discusses possible methods to predict a GRB’s unknown progenitor and explains work performed aspart of the BurstCube mission. With the recent association of at least five kilonovae with GRBs longer than 5 seconds, and at least one supernova coincident with a GRB shorter than 2 seconds, it has become difficult to associate a given GRB with a progenitor without directly observing the outflow of the resulting nuclear fusion. I contribute to the development of statistical models by studying physical relationships and applying them to large data sets. While two of the three tested statistical models do not differentiate based on known progenitors, the successful relationship is simple enough to be used on many different instruments, as it requires only three catalog variables
a GRB’s duration, its peak energy in the gamma-ray prompt emission, and its fluence. The statistical method, support vector machine (SVM), is also stable across many orders of magnitude and able to easily handle the unbalanced nature of GRB training samples. This implies that until the sample of known progenitors is a higher fraction of the sample of GRBs, SVM may be an ideal procedure. As part of collecting this data on GRBs and their progenitors, I participated in the calibration, testing, operations, and data analysis of the BurstCube mission. As detailed in Ch. 3, BurstCube was created to enable more GRB detections coincident with the fourth observing run (O4) of LVK. It was hypothesized that more effective area would allow for more GRBs to be co-detected with GWs. Due to a lack of coincident Neutron Star (NS) merger signals, this was not possible. The BurstCube observatory also suffered a series of unexpected hardware failures which limited operations and caused it to deorbit in five months rather than receive over a year of data. BurstCube was ultimately a proof of concept for future small GRB missions such as StarBurst. While much of the code I wrote for the mission could not be validated on-orbit, it is open-source and ready for adoption by those future missions.
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