Associate Professor Takanori Sakamoto attended NASA Missions which caught first light from a Gravitational-Wave Event

The first light was seen from a gravitational-wave event discovered on August 17 by observations from both space and on Earth. 1.7 seconds after the gravitational-wave reached Earth, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope caught the high-energy radiation from the explosion associated with the merging of two neutron stars. NASA's Swift, Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and dozens of other Earth-based observation devices succeeded in observing the event as it unfolded. These research results have been published through Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters and The Astrophysical Journal.

Associate Professor Sakamoto at College of Science and Engineering, Department of Mathematics at AGU is a member of Swift team as well as a team member observing gamma-ray bursts using Chandra X-Ray. For this research, he contributes to the observatory and data analysis with Swift and the Chandra X-Ray.

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