The Galaxy Hosts and Large‐Scale Environments of Short‐Hard Gamma‐Ray Bursts

The rapid succession of discovery of short--duration hard--spectrum GRBs has led to unprecedented insights into the energetics of the explosion and nature of the progenitors. Yet short of the detection of a smoking gun, like a burst of coincident gravitational radiation or a Li-Paczynski mini-supernova, it is unlikely that a definitive claim can be made for the progenitors. As was the case with long--duration soft--spectrum GRBs, however, the expectation is that a systematic study of the hosts and the locations of short GRBs could begin to yield fundamental clues about their nature. We present the first aggregate study of the host galaxies of short--duration hard--spectrum GRBs. In particular, we present the Gemini--North and Keck discovery spectra of the galaxies that hosted three short GRBs and a moderate--resolution (R~6000) spectrum of a fourth host. We find that these short--hard GRBs originate in a variety of low-redshift (z
8 pages, 2 figures. Accepted to ApJ