NASA's Fermi Telescope detects Gamma-Ray Burst near gravitational wave source

Energy waves travelled for over a billion years gently rattling space-time in the vicinity of Earth. They provided base and evidence to the Theory of General Relativity of Albert Einstein. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, captured the disturbance made by gravitational waves. This was the first ever detection of the gravitational waves.

The recent discovery, which gave birth to numerous scientific possibilities, could pave the way for scientists to know more in-depth about the working of our universe. The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted a brief flash of gamma rays. It occurred less than half a second following that gravitational wave signal which was discovered recently.

This looks to be strange because black holes merge cleanly and do not produce any sort of light and this is where the requirement of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope comes. The detection of light from a gravitational wave source will pave the way for a much deeper and clear understanding of the event, according to NASA.

Fermi’s GBM catches the view of the entire sky and is not block by the Earth. It is sensitive to X-rays and gamma rays that have energies between 8,000 and 40 million electron volts (eV). The energy of visible light ranges between about 2 and 3 eV. NASA has released a video that demonstrates the visualization of merging black holes and gravitational waves.

Explaining the visualization, NASA said, “The yellow structures near the black holes illustrate the strong curvature of space-time in the region. Orange ripples represent distortions of space-time caused by the rapidly orbiting masses. These distortions spread out and weaken, ultimately becoming gravitational waves (purple). The merger timescale depends on the masses of the black holes. For a system containing black holes with about 30 times the sun’s mass, similar to the one detected by LIGO in 2015, the orbital period at the start of the movie is just 65 milliseconds, with the black holes moving at about 15 percent the speed of light.”

“Space-time distortions radiate away orbital energy and cause the binary to contract quickly. As the two black holes near each other, they merge into a single black hole that settles into its "ringdown" phase, where the final gravitational waves are emitted. For the 2015 LIGO detection, these events played out in little more than a quarter of a second. This simulation was performed on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center.”

Here is the video: