Speaker
Description
The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) routinely observes the unocculted sky for transient astrophysical phenomena in gamma-rays. On August 17th, 2017 Fermi-GBM detected GRB 170817A, the first unambiguous electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational wave event. Observationally, GRB 170817A was an ordinary short GRB. Together with the distance information from the gravitational wave measurements, however this GRB is subluminous by orders of magnitude. I will discuss the gamma-ray properties and the possible interpretations of this multi-messenger event. I will present the enhancements the GBM team is making to prepare for future gravitational wave observations focusing on the sub-threshold events, those that do not trigger GBM. Archival searches for events similar to GRB 170817A are also ongoing. I will present some preliminary results from these searches.
