An 11-Year Catalog of Gamma-Ray Transients: A Comprehensive Search with Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor Data

TL;DR

This paper presents an extensive 11-year catalog of gamma-ray transient events detected by Fermi GBM, including known and unknown events, using multiple search methods and classification algorithms, significantly expanding existing gamma-ray transient data.

Contribution

The study introduces new search and classification algorithms applied to 11 years of GBM data, resulting in a comprehensive catalog of over a million gamma-ray transient events, including many previously unlisted.

Findings

Catalog contains over a million events including gamma-ray bursts and solar flares.

New algorithms effectively classify known and unknown transient events.

The catalog significantly expands the existing gamma-ray transient database.

Abstract

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on board Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has produced the largest database of all-sky observations in gamma rays with its continuous data with high time and energy resolutions. These data contain a wealth of unidentified transient events that did not trigger the detectors for various reasons. We conducted extensive searches to identify such untriggered transient events observed with GBM in 11 years (July 2010 - June 2021). In particular, we employed four different search modes with various energy ranges (mainly below 300 keV) and time resolutions (from 8 ms to 2 s), utilizing three statistical methods (signal-to-noise ratio, Poisson, and Bayesian statistics), each with different effectiveness in identifying specific classes of transients. Moreover, we developed algorithms for known-event flagging as well as unknown-event classification for our candidate events found in the searches. In this paper, we present our search methodologies, event flagging and classification algorithms and the resulting comprehensive event catalog. The catalog contains more than a million events in total, including known events such as gamma-ray bursts, soft-gamma repeater bursts, galactic X-ray source activities, terrestrial gamma flashes, and solar flares. For each candidate event, the catalog presents the event time, detection significance, event duration, hardness ratios, known-event flagging results, and classification probabilities. Our short-transient catalog significantly expands the currently-existing list of known events and complements the GBM trigger catalog. The event database with filtering capabilities is also publicly available at https://magnetars.sabanciuniv.edu/gbm, which allows users to retrieve event information based on their input queries along with the event lightcurves.