GMS: Multimessenger Timeline Resources

This animation captures phenomena observed over the course of nine days following the neutron star merger known as GW170817, detected on Aug. 17, 2017. They include gravitational waves (pale arcs), a near-light-speed jet that produced gamma rays (magenta), expanding debris from a kilonova that produced ultraviolet (violet), optical and infrared (blue-white to red) emission, and, once the jet directed toward us expanded into our view from Earth, X-rays (blue).

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Music: "Exploding Skies" from Killer Tracks

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

Complete transcript available.

On Sept. 22, 2017, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, represented in this illustration by strings of sensors under the ice, detected a high-energy neutrino that appeared to come from deep space. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (top left) pinpointed the source as a supermassive black hole in a galaxy located about 4 billion light-years away. It is the first source of a high-energy neutrino from outside our galaxy ever identified.

Credit: NASA/Fermi and Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University

A simple animation of a gamma ray moving through space.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Animation that includes a view of how Fermi’s Large Area Telescope detects gamma rays by converting them into electron-positron pairs. This is an upres of the original animation frames to UHD resolution (3840 x 2160).

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

This animation illustrates cosmic ray particles striking Earth's atmosphere and creating showers of particles.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

An artistic animation of the Sun.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

A visualization of a black hole and its surrounding accretion disk.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman

GRB 101225A, better known as the "Christmas burst," was an unusually long-lasting gamma-ray burst. Because its distance was not measured, astronomers came up with two radically different interpretations. In the first, a solitary neutron star in our own galaxy shredded and accreted an approaching comet-like body. In the second, a neutron star was engulfed by, spiraled into and merged with an evolved giant star in a distant galaxy. Now, thanks to a measurement of the Christmas burst's host galaxy, astronomers have determined that it represented the collapse and explosion of a supergiant star hundreds of times larger than the Sun.

Music: Revelation of One

For complete transcript, click here.

NASA's Gamma-Ray Imaging Spectrometer (GRIS) is readied for its fifth balloon flight at Alice Springs, Australia, in 1992. The experiment made nine trips into the stratosphere for a total flight time of 223 hours.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Steve Snodgrass

NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory drifts away from the space shuttle Atlantis on April 7, 1991, following its deployment during the STS-37 mission. Compton's successful career ended in June 2000 when the observatory reentered Earth's atmosphere.

Credit: NASA/Ken Cameron

The Italian-Dutch satellite BeppoSAX played a crucial role in resolving the origins of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), brief, powerful explosions initially discovered in 1967 by the U.S. Vela satellites. On Feb. 28, 1997, moments after a GRB was detected, BeppoSAX turned its X-ray telescopes to the location and spotted an X-ray afterglow -- the first GRB observation in a wavelength other than gamma rays. The satellite's accurate positions, together with other observations, showed that GRBs originate beyond our Milky Way galaxy.

Credit: BeppoSAX Science Data Center and Agenzia Spaziale Italiana

Shown here is a computer simulation of the merger of two black holes and the resulting emission of gravitational radiation. Colored fields represent a component of the curvature of space-time. The outer red sheets correspond directly to the outgoing gravitational radiation detected by gravitational-wave observatories. The brighter yellow areas near the black holes do not correspond to physical structures but generally indicate where strong non-linear gravitational-field interactions are in play.

Credit: NASA/C. Henze