Multimessenger Timeline Resources

A simple animation of a gamma ray moving through space.

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

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

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