On the difference between the short and long gamma-ray bursts

We argue that the distributions of both the intrinsic fluence and the intrinsic duration of the gamma-ray emission in gamma-ray bursts from the BATSE sample are well represented by log-normal distributions, in which the intrinsic dispersion is much larger than the cosmological time dilatation and redshift effects. We perform separate bivariate log-normal distribution fits to the BATSE short and long burst samples. The bivariate log-normal behaviour results in an ellipsoidal distribution, whose major axis determines an overall statistical relation between the fluence and the duration. We show that this fit provides evidence for a power-law dependence between the fluence and the duration, with a statistically significant different index for the long and short groups. We discuss possible biases, which might affect this result, and argue that the effect is probably real. This may provide a potentially useful constraint for models of long and short bursts.