The observation of Gamma Ray Bursts and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes with AGILE

Abstract

Since its early phases of operation, the AGILE mission is successfully observing Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) in the hard X-ray band with the SuperAGILE imager and in the MeV range with the Mini-Calorimeter. Up to now, three firm GRB detections were obtained above 25 MeV and some bursts were detected with lower statistical confidence in the same energy band. When a GRB is localized, either by SuperAGILE or Swift/BAT or INTEGRAL/IBIS or Fermi/GBM or IPN, inside the field of view of the Gamma Ray Imager of AGILE, a detection is searched for in the gamma ray band or an upper limit is provided. A promising result of AGILE is the detection of very short gamma ray transients, a few ms in duration and possibly identified with Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes. In this paper we show the current status of the observation of Gamma Ray Bursts and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes with AGILE.

Four pages and four figures

References in corpus (5)

• SuperAGILE: the hard X-ray Imager for the AGILE space mission
• Design and construction of the Mini-Calorimeter of the AGILE satellite
• AGILE detection of delayed gamma-ray emission from GRB 080514B
• Gamma-ray burst detection with the AGILE mini-calorimeter
• A photometric redshift of $z=1.8_{-0.3}^{+0.4}$ for the \agile GRB 080514B