| Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have become a truly unique puzzle in Astronomy. Unlike quasars and pulsars which were explained within years of their discovery, the origins of GRBs remain a mystery more then thirty years after their discovery. Even the most basic information about these events, such as a concrete estimate of their distance, wasn't known until only a few years ago. The difficulty in our ability to obtain information about the nature of GRBs reflects their transient nature, which occur in random location in the sky with a rate of roughly one a day. Obtaining multi-wavelength observations of such brief events is a situation that astronomy has rarely been faced with. It has only been recently, with the advent of rapid arcminute x-ray localization, that we have started to decern information regarding the intrinsic properties of these events. In this thesis, I present a compilation of research describing our efforts to investigate the intrinsic properties of GRBs.;The thesis is broken down into chapters including an introduction to the field of GRB astronomy, three chapters covering a range of spectral and temporal investigation, two of which have been published in the Astrophysics Journal with plans to submit the third and a conclusion outlining current and future work on the promises of using GRBs for cosmological research. |
