An optical gamma-ray burst catalogue with measured redshift – I. Data release of 535 gamma-ray bursts and colour evolution : Data release of 535 gamma-ray bursts and colour evolution

Dainotti, M G and De Simone, B and Malik, R F Mohideen and Pasumarti, V and Levine, D and Saha, N and Gendre, B and Kido, D and Watson, A M and Becerra, R L and Belkin, S and Desai, S and do E S Pedreira, A C C and Das, U and Li, L and Oates, S R and Cenko, S B and Pozanenko, A and Volnova, A and Hu, Y-D and Castro-Tirado, A J and Orange, N B and Moriya, T J and Fraija, N and Niino, Y and Rinaldi, E and Butler, N R and González, J d J G and Kutyrev, A S and Lee, W H and Prochaska, X and Ramirez-Ruiz, E and Richer, M and Siegel, M H and Misra, K and Rossi, A and Lopresti, C and Quadri, U and Strabla, L and Ruocco, N and Leonini, S and Conti, M and Rosi, P and Ramirez, L M T and Zola, S and Jindal, I and Kumar, R and Chan, L and Fuentes, M and Lambiase, G and Kalinowski, K K and Jamal, W (2024) An optical gamma-ray burst catalogue with measured redshift – I. Data release of 535 gamma-ray bursts and colour evolution : Data release of 535 gamma-ray bursts and colour evolution. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 533 (4). pp. 4023-4043. ISSN 0035-8711

Abstract

We present the largest optical photometry compilation of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) with redshifts (z). We include 64813 observations of 535 events (including upper limits) from 28 February 1997 to 18 August 2023. We also present a user-friendly web tool grbLC which allows users to visualize photometry, coordinates, redshift, host galaxy extinction, and spectral indices for each event in our database. Furthermore, we have added a Gamma-ray Coordinate Network (GCN) scraper that can be used to collect data by gathering magnitudes from the GCNs. The web tool also includes a package for uniformly investigating colour evolution. We compute the optical spectral indices for 138 GRBs, for which we have at least four filters at the same epoch in our sample, and craft a procedure to distinguish between GRBs with and without colour evolution. By providing a uniform format and repository for the optical catalogue, this web-based archive is the first step towards unifying several community efforts to gather the photometric information for all GRBs with known redshifts. This catalogue will enable population studies by providing light curves (LCs) with better coverage since we have gathered data from different ground-based locations. Consequently, these LCs can be used to train future LC reconstructions for an extended inference of the redshift. The data gathering also allows us to fill some of the orbital gaps from Swift in crucial points of the LCs, e.g. at the end of the plateau emission or where a jet break is identified.