Ryde and Petrosian have pointed out that the rise phases of gamma-ray burst (GRB) pulses originate from the widths of the intrinsic pulses and their decay phases are determined by the curvature effect of the expanding fireball surface based on their simplified formula. In this paper we investigate in detail the issue based on the formula in Ref.[20], which is derived based on a model of highly symmetric expanding fireballs, where the Doppler effect is the key factor to be concerned about, and no terms are omitted in their derivation. Our analyses show that the decay phases of the observed pulses originate from the contributions from both the curvature effect of the expanding fireball and the two timescales of the local pulses, and the rise phases of the observed pulses only come from the two timescales of the local pulses. Associated with a local pulse with both rise and decay portions, the light curve of GRBs in the rise portion is expected to undergo a concave phase and then a convex one, whereas that in the decay portion is expected to evolve by an opposite process. And the ratio of the concave timescale to the convex one in the rise phase of the observed pulse linearly increases with the ratio of the rising timescale to the decay one of the local pulse (Trd), whereas the ratio of the convex timescale to the concave timescale in its decay phase linearly decreases with Trd. The two correlations are independent of the local pulse forms and the rest-frame radiation forms. But the different forms of local pulses and the different values of Trd gives rise to the diversity of the light curve pulse shapes. We test a sample of 86 GRB pulses detected by the BATSE instrument on board the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and find that the characteristics do exist in the light curve of GRBs.
In this paper, the effect of the intrinsic distribution of cosmological candles is investigated. We find that in the case of a narrow distribution the deviation of the observed modulus of sources from the expected central value can be estimated within a ceratin range. We thus introduce lower and upper limits of X^2, X^2min and X^2max to estimate cosmological parameters by applying the conventional minimizing X^2 method. We apply this method to a gammaray burst (GRB) sample as well as to a combined sample including this GRB sample and an SN Ia sample. Our analysis shows that: a) in the case of assuming an intrinsic distribution of candles of the GRB sample, the effect of the distribution is obvious and should not be neglected; b) taking into account this effect would lead to a poorer constraint of the cosmological parameter ranges. The analysis suggests that in the attempt of constraining the cosmological model with current GRB samples, the results tend to be worse than was previously anticipated if the mentioned intrinsic distribution does exist.