Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Three years of GBM science highlights

Valerie Connaughton

National Space Science & Technology Center
University of Alabama in Huntsville

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) is the secondary experiment on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched in June 2008. GBM is an all-sky instrument, sensitive between 8 keV and 40 MeV, with a primary objective of supporting the Large Area Telescope (LAT) in observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). Together, the GBM and LAT instruments have provided ground-breaking measurements of GRBs that have, after 10 years of focus on GRB afterglows, inspired renewed interest in the prompt emission phase of GRBs and the physical mechanisms that fuel them. In addition to GRB science, GBM has made significant contributions to the study of the lightning-related Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes, to the astrophysics of galactic sources such as Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters, accretion-powered pulsars and other hard X-ray binary systems, and to solar flare science. I will, in this presentation, discuss the observational highlights of GBM.