The Interplanetary Network Supplement to the Fermi GBM Catalog - An AO-2 and AO-3 Guest Investigator Project

TL;DR

This paper presents the IPN supplement to the Fermi GBM catalog, detailing how combining localizations from the Interplanetary Network with GBM data significantly improves burst position accuracy for scientific studies.

Contribution

It introduces a method of combining IPN and GBM localizations to produce more precise error boxes for gamma-ray bursts.

Findings

158 GBM bursts detected by IPN in two years

Localization error boxes reduced by up to 10,000 times

Enhanced accuracy supports diverse scientific investigations

Abstract

In the first two years of operation of the Fermi GBM, the 9-spacecraft Interplanetary Network (IPN) detected 158 GBM bursts with one or two distant spacecraft, and triangulated them to annuli or error boxes. Combining the IPN and GBM localizations leads to error boxes which are up to 4 orders of magnitude smaller than those of the GBM alone. These localizations comprise the IPN supplement to the GBM catalog, and they support a wide range of scientific investigations.