Far From Home: Offsets of Short GRBs from Isolated Double Neutron Star Populations

Observed short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs) exhibit a broad distribution of projected host offsets, with a pronounced tail to tens of kiloparsecs. We test whether double neutron star (DNS) systems formed in the field can reproduce this distribution by synthesizing populations with POSYDON, sampling natal-kick prescriptions, and evolving their orbits in a Milky Way-like potential to merger. Our models naturally produce offsets of tens of kiloparsecs for plausible cases. Furthermore, we find that these offsets are most sensitive to where the binaries were born, with binaries formed at larger galactocentric distances yielding larger final offsets. These results support field-formation of DNS systems as consistent with the observed sGRB offsets.