SIMBAD references

A significant proportion ( ∼ 30 percent) of the short-duration gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) localized by Swift have no detected host galaxy coincident with the burst location to deep limits, and also no high-likelihood association with proximate galaxies on the sky. These SGRBs may represent a population at moderately high redshifts (z ≳ 1), for which the hosts are faint, or a population where the progenitor has been kicked far from its host or is sited in an outlying globular cluster. We consider the afterglow and host observations of three `hostless' bursts (GRBs 090305A, 091109B and 111020A), coupled with a new observational diagnostic to aid the association of SGRBs with putative host galaxies to investigate this issue. Considering the well localized SGRB sample, 7/25 SGRBs can be classified as `hostless' by our diagnostic. Statistically, however, the proximity of these seven SGRBs to nearby galaxies is higher than is seen for random positions on the sky. This suggests that the majority of `hostless' SGRBs have likely been kicked from proximate galaxies at moderate redshift. Though this result still suggests only a small proportion of SGRBs will be within the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory horizon for neutron star-neutron star (NS) or neutron star-black hole (BH) inspiral detection (z ∼ 0.1), in the particular case of GRB 111020A a plausible host candidate is at z = 0.02.