The nearest neighbors of BATSE gamma-ray bursts: Narrowing the possibilities

Abstract
The large errors in the locations of gamma‐ray bursts observed by the Bursts and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) forces one to adopt statistical comparisons of the burst catalog to models of burst isotropy to determine if bursts are repeating or clustered. In the first BATSE catalog, a nearest neighbor analysis finds a deviation from isotropy. In a recent article it was shown that known instrumental effects cannot produce significant small scale anisotropies. It was also shown that burst repeater models can produce the observe anisotropies. In this paper we examine in more detail repeater burst models. We also show that nearest and farthest neighbor analyses of more recent bursts fail to find significant small scale clustering.