We present results of an extensive observing campaign of the short- duration, hard spectrum gamma-ray burst (GRB) 070724A, aimed at detecting the radioactively powered emission that might follow from a binary merger or collapse involving compact …
Swift captured for the first time a smoothly rising X-ray re-brightening of clear non-flaring origin after the steep decay in a long gamma-ray burst (GRB): GRB081028. A rising phase is likely present in all GRBs but is usually hidden by the prompt …
We present the discovery of an absorption-line redshift of z = 2.609 for GRB090426, establishing the first firm lower limit to a redshift for a gamma-ray burst (GRB) with an observed duration of <2s. With a rest-frame burst duration of T$_90z$ = …
We revisit echelle spectra (spectral resolution R ≈ 40,000) of eight gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows to obtain the incidence (dN/dz) of weak intervening Mg II systems at a mean redshift of langzrang = 1.5. We show that dN/dz of systems having …
We present a sample of 77 optical afterglows (OAs) of Swift detected gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) for which spectroscopic follow-up observations have been secured. Our first objective is to measure the redshifts of the bursts. For the majority (90%) of …
In this work, we present the first results of our imaging campaign at Keck Observatory to identify the host galaxies of ``dark'' gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), events with no detected optical afterglow or with detected optical flux significantly fainter …
We present results from an imaging and spectroscopic study of four strong Mg II absorbers of W(2796) gsim 1 ̊A revealed by the afterglow of GRB 060418 at z $_GRB$ = 1.491. These absorbers, at z = 0.603, 0.656, 1.107, and z $_GRB$, exhibit large ion …
GRB 080607 has provided the first observational signatures of molecular absorption bands toward any galaxy hosting a gamma-ray burst (GRB). Despite the identification of dozens of features as belonging to various atomic and molecular (H$_2$ and CO) …
We report on observations of GRB 080503, a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) with very bright extended emission (about 30 times the gamma-ray fluence of the initial spike) in conjunction with a thorough comparison to other short Swift events. In spite of …
Several correlations among parameters derived from modeling the high- energy properties of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been reported. We show that well known examples of these have common features indicative of strong contamination by selection …