Observations of Two Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs) over a Wide Energy Range with the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor

Details Observations of Two Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs) over a Wide Energy Range with the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor Observations of Two Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs) over a Wide Energy Range with the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufmae21a..02f&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #AE21A-02

Physics

3304 Atmospheric Electricity, 3324 Lightning

Scientific paper

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was launched into low-Earth orbit on June 11 of this year, carrying the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), an omnidirectional instrument capable of detecting Terrestrial Gamma- ray Flashes (TGFs) with high sensitivity. The GBM detector array is a set of 14 scintillation detectors arranged around the spacecraft and pointed in different directions, primarily intended for the observation of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Compared to the earlier BATSE and RHESSI instruments, which gave us our current understanding of TGFs, GBM has better absolute timing accuracy, is capable of measuring larger fluxes without saturating, and measures over a wider energy range. These capabilities make it an ideal instrument to answer two of the major remaining questions about TGFs: whether they are the cause or an effect of the associated lightning, and their maximum possible brightness and energy content. The first TGFs from GBM were observed on 7 August and 28 August, 2008. Their measured energy spectrum extends from ~10 keV to ~15 MeV, over three decades in energy. It is observed that the spectrum below ~100 keV shows characteristics of being highly absorbed and scattered from higher energies, and the radiation begins to fall rapidly above ~10 MeV, consistent with previous observations with RHESSI.

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