The dark GRB 080207 in an extremely red host and the implications for gamma-ray bursts in highly obscured environments

We present comprehensive X-ray, optical, near- and mid-infrared and submm observations of GRB080207 and its host galaxy. The afterglow was undetected in the optical and near-infrared (nIR) implying an X-ray-to-optical spectral slope less than 0.3, identifying GRB080207 as a dark burst. Swift X-ray observations show extreme absorption in the host, which is confirmed by the unusually large optical extinction found by modelling the X-ray to nIR afterglow spectral energy distribution. Our Chandra observations obtained 8d post-burst allow us to place the afterglow on the sky to subarcsec accuracy, enabling us to pinpoint an extremely red galaxy (ERO), with R-K > 5.4 (g-K~ 7.5, VEGAmag) at the afterglow location. Follow-up host observations with the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, Gemini, Keck and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope provide a photometric redshift solution of Z ≈ 1.74 -0.06+0.05 (1σ, 1.56 2, are at lower metallicity than the submm galaxy population, offering a likely explanation for the dearth of submm-detected GRB hosts. However, we also show that the dark GRB hosts are systematically more massive than those hosting optically bright events, perhaps implying that previous host samples are severely biased by the exclusion of dark events. © 2012 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS.