GRB 060505: A Possible Short-Duration Gamma-Ray Burst in a Star-forming Region at a Redshift of 0.09

On 2006 May 5, a 4 s duration, low-energy, ~1049 erg, gamma-ray burst (GRB) was observed, spatially associated with a z = 0.0894 galaxy. Here we report the discovery of the GRB optical afterglow and observations of its environment using Gemini South, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Chandra, Swift, and the Very Large Array. The optical afterglow of this GRB is spatially associated with a prominent star-forming region in the Sc-type galaxy 2dFGRS S173Z112. Its proximity to a star-forming region suggests that the progenitor delay time, from birth to explosion, is smaller than ~10 Myr. Our HST deep imaging rules out the presence of a supernova brighter than an absolute magnitude of about -11 (or -12.6 in the case of maximal extinction) at about 2 weeks after the burst and limits the ejected mass of radioactive 56Ni to be less than about 2 × 10-4 M☉ (assuming no extinction). Although it was suggested that GRB 060505 may belong to a new class of long-duration GRBs with no supernova, we argue that the simplest interpretation is that the physical mechanism responsible for this burst is the same as that for short-duration GRBs.