High-energy astronomy is the study of astronomical objects that release electromagnetic radiation of highly energetic wavelengths. It includes X-ray astronomy, gamma-ray astronomy, extreme UV astronomy, neutrino astronomy, and studies of cosmic rays. The physical study of these phenomena is referred to as high-energy astrophysics.
Marshall Space Flight Center, located in Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, is the U.S. government's civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. As the largest NASA center, MSFC's first mission was developing the Saturn launch vehicles for the Apollo program. Marshall has been the lead center for the Space Shuttle main propulsion and external tank; payloads and related crew training; International Space Station (ISS) design and assembly; computers, networks, and information management; and the Space Launch System. Located on the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, MSFC is named in honor of General of the Army George C. Marshall.
STS-37, the thirty-ninth NASA Space Shuttle mission and the eighth flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, was a six-day mission with the primary objective of launching the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), the second of the Great Observatories program which included the visible-spectrum Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope. The mission also featured two spacewalks, the first since 1985.
The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) was a space observatory detecting photons with energies from 20 keV to 30 GeV, in Earth orbit from 1991 to 2000. The observatory featured four main telescopes in one spacecraft, covering X-rays and gamma rays, including various specialized sub-instruments and detectors. Following 14 years of effort, the observatory was launched from Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-37 on April 5, 1991, and operated until its deorbit on June 4, 2000. It was deployed in low Earth orbit at 450 km (280 mi) to avoid the Van Allen radiation belt. It was the heaviest astrophysical payload ever flown at that time at 16,300 kilograms (35,900 lb).
The Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics is part of the Max Planck Society, located in Garching, near Munich, Germany. In 1991 the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics split up into the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, the Max Planck Institute for Physics and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. The Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics was founded as sub-institute in 1963. The scientific activities of the institute are mostly devoted to astrophysics with telescopes orbiting in space. A large amount of the resources are spent for studying black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy and in the remote universe.
NASA's series of Great Observatories satellites are four large, powerful space-based astronomical telescopes launched between 1990 and 2003. They were built with different technology to examine specific wavelength/energy regions of the electromagnetic spectrum: gamma rays, X-rays, visible and ultraviolet light, and infrared light.
A terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), also known as dark lightning, is a burst of gamma rays produced in Earth's atmosphere. TGFs have been recorded to last 0.2 to 3.5 milliseconds, and have energies of up to 20 million electronvolts. It is speculated that TGFs are caused by intense electric fields produced above or inside thunderstorms. Scientists have also detected energetic positrons and electrons produced by terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.
The General Coordinates Network (GCN), formerly known as the Gamma-ray burst Coordinates Network, is an open-source platform created by NASA to receive and transmit alerts about astronomical transient phenomena. This includes neutrino detections by observatories such as IceCube or Super-Kamiokande, gravitational wave events from the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA interferometers, and gamma-ray bursts observed by Fermi, Swift or INTEGRAL. One of the main goals is to allow for follow-up observations of an event by other observatories, in hope to observe multi-messenger events.
Cornelis A. "Neil" Gehrels was an American astrophysicist specializing in the field of gamma-ray astronomy. He was Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) from 1995 until his death, and was best known for his work developing the field from early balloon instruments to today's space observatories such as the NASA Swift mission, for which he was the principal investigator. He was leading the WFIRST wide-field infrared telescope forward toward a launch in the mid-2020s. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The history of gamma-ray began with the serendipitous detection of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) on July 2, 1967, by the U.S. Vela satellites. After these satellites detected fifteen other GRBs, Ray Klebesadel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory published the first paper on the subject, Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts of Cosmic Origin. As more and more research was done on these mysterious events, hundreds of models were developed in an attempt to explain their origins.
Gamma-ray astronomy is a subfield of astronomy where scientists observe and study celestial objects and phenomena in outer space which emit cosmic electromagnetic radiation in the form of gamma rays, i.e. photons with the highest energies at the very shortest wavelengths. Radiation below 100 keV is classified as X-rays and is the subject of X-ray astronomy.
GRB 991216, nicknamed the Beethoven Burst by Dr. Brad Schaefer of Yale University, was a gamma-ray burst observed on December 16, 1999, coinciding with the 229th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth. A gamma-ray burst is a highly luminous flash associated with an explosion in a distant galaxy and producing gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, and often followed by a longer-lived "afterglow" emitted at longer wavelengths.
David Louis Band or David L. Band was an astronomer who studied the theory of gamma-ray bursts.
Donald Delbert Clayton was an American astrophysicist whose most visible achievement was the prediction from nucleosynthesis theory that supernovae are intensely radioactive. That earned Clayton the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1992) for “theoretical astrophysics related to the formation of (chemical) elements in the explosions of stars and to the observable products of these explosions”. Supernovae thereafter became the most important stellar events in astronomy owing to their profoundly radioactive nature. Not only did Clayton discover radioactive nucleosynthesis during explosive silicon burning in stars but he also predicted a new type of astronomy based on it, namely the associated gamma-ray line radiation emitted by matter ejected from supernovae. That paper was selected as one of the fifty most influential papers in astronomy during the twentieth century for the Centennial Volume of the American Astronomical Society. He gathered support from influential astronomers and physicists for a new NASA budget item for a gamma-ray-observatory satellite, achieving successful funding for Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. With his focus on radioactive supernova gas Clayton discovered a new chemical pathway causing carbon dust to condense there by a process that is activated by the radioactivity.
Hakkı Boran Ögelman was a Turkish physicist and astrophysicist. He was an expert on gamma ray astronomy, the physics of neutron stars, and solar energy and worked on several key topics in modern astrophysics. He made many contributions to high energy astrophysics. In his early professional career he engaged in the SAS-II Small Gamma Ray Astronomy Satellite experiment development, data analysis, and first detection and imaging of our universe in gamma rays with his NASA colleagues, as well as in other fields of physics. His main interests in the field of astrophysics were the study of gamma ray astronomy and compact objects such as neutron stars and pulsars. Ögelman worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, Çukurova University in Adana, Turkey, Max Planck Institute (MPI) at Garching, Germany and the University of Wisconsin.
Robert J. Nemiroff is an Astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at Michigan Technological University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1987 and his B.S. from Lehigh University in Engineering Physics in 1982. He is an active researcher with interests that include gamma-ray bursts, gravitational lensing, and cosmology, and is the cofounder and coeditor of Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), the home page of which receives over a million hits a day, approximately 20% of nasa.gov traffic. He is married and has one daughter.
Dr. Martin C. Weisskopf until his retirement from NASA in at the end of May, 2022, was project scientist for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Chief Scientist for X-ray Astronomy in the Space Sciences Department at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He was also the Principal Investigator of the Small Explorer mission the Imaging X-ray Polarization Explorer (IXPE).
María Magdalena González Sánchez is a Mexican astrophysicist, nuclear physicist, researcher, and professor best known for her contributions in gamma ray research and for being the head of the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Experiment (HAWC). She has published 90 articles about her field of study in indexed journals. In 2015 she received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Recognition from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Filippo Frontera is an Italian astrophysicist and professor, who deals with astronomical investigations on celestial gamma-rays.
