Image Details
Caption: Figure 7.
Left: the host-galaxy stellar mass (at zGRB) vs. physical projected offset for our GRB-KN sample (stars) and the A. E. Nugent et al. (2022) short GRB sample (circles). The color indicates the percent of stellar mass enriched with r-process (penrich) from each event at z = 0, and the black dashed line denotes the Milky Way properties (T. C. Licquia & J. A. Newman 2015). Middle: the same figure, but for the specific SFR (SFR/M*) vs. physical projected offset. Right: the redshift vs. penrich at z = 0. While there does not appear to be a trend between penrich and host stellar mass, GRB offset, or redshift (at 0.3 ≲ z ≲ 1), we do find that penrich increases with sSFR. Importantly, this emphasizes that NS mergers occurring in environments with little ongoing star formation will have no impact on their r-process enrichment. From this, we can infer that not all NS mergers are contributing to stellar r-process enrichment.
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.