Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts with the Fermi Large Area Telescope have prompted theoretical advances and posed big challenges in the understanding of such extreme sources, despite the fact that GRB emission above 100 MeV is a fairly rare event. Th
e first Fermi/LAT GRB catalog, published a year ago, presented 28 detections out of ~300 bursts detected by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor (GBM) within the LAT field of view. Building on the results from that work and on recent development in the understanding of the systematic errors on GBM localizations, we developed a new detection algorithm which increased the number of detections by 40 %. Even more recently the development of the new event analysis for the LAT (Pass 8) has increased the number of detections within the first 3 years of the mission to 45, up 50 % with respect to the published catalog. The second LAT GRB catalog, in preparation, will cover more than 6 years of the mission and will break the barrier of 100 detected GRBs, a more than 20-fold improvement with respect to observations before the Fermi era in the same energy range. We will review the main features of the new algorithm, as well as preliminary results from this investigation.
The Fermi observatory, with its Gamma-Ray Bursts monitor (GBM) and Large Area Telescope (LAT), is observing Gamma-ray Bursts with unprecedented spectral coverage and sensitivity, from ~10 keV to > 300 GeV. In the first 3 years of the mission it obser
ved emission above 100 MeV from 35 GRBs, an order of magnitude gain with respect to previous observations in this energy range. In this paper we review the main results obtained on such sample, highlighting also the relationships with the low-energy features (as measured by the GBM), and with measurements from observatories at other wavelengths. We also briefly discuss prospects for detection of GRBs by future Very-High Energy observatories such as HAWC and CTA, and by Gravitational Wave experiments.
We present a catalogue with the properties of all the bursts detected and localized by the IBIS instrument onboard the INTEGRAL satellite from November 2002 to September 2008. The sample is composed of 56 bursts, corresponding to a rate of ~ 0.8 GRB
per month. Thanks to the performances of the INTEGRAL Burst Alert System, 50% of the IBIS GRBs have detected afterglows, while 5% have redshift measurements. A spectral analysis of the 43 bursts in the INTEGRAL public archive has been carried out using the most recent software and calibration, deriving an updated, homogeneous and accurate catalogue with the spectral features of the sample. When possible also a time-resolved spectral analysis has been carried out. The GRBs in the sample have 20-200 keV fluences in the range 5 x 1E-8 --2.5 x 1E-4 erg cm-2, and peak fluxes in the range 0.11 - 56 ph cm-2 s-1. While most of the spectra are well fitted by a power law with photon index ~ 1.6, we found that 9 bursts are better described by a cut-off power law, resulting in Ep values in the range 35--190 keV. Altough these results are comparable with those obtained with BAT onboard Swift, there is a marginal evidence that ISGRI detects dimmer bursts than Swift/BAT. Using the revised spectral parameters and an updated sky exposure map that takes into account also the effects of the GRB trigger efficiency, we strengthen the evidence for a spatial correlation with the super galactic plane of the faint bursts with long spectral lag (Foley et al.,2008).
Two new expanding X-ray rings were detected by the Swift XRT instrument during early follow-up observations of GRB 061019 and GRB 070129, increasing to 5 the number of dust scattering X-ray halos observed around GRBs. Although these two halos were pa
rticularly faint, a sensitive analysis can be performed that optimizes the method originally developed by Tiengo & Mereghetti (2006) to analyze dust scattering rings observed with XMM-Newton for the Swift satellite. In the case of GRB 061019, a known giant molecular cloud is identified as the one responsible for the scattering process, and its distance is accurately measured (d=940$pm$40 pc) through the dynamics of the expanding ring. In the second case, XRT observed both the main peak of the prompt emission of GRB 070129 and the scattering halo, but the small number of detected halo photons prevents us from distinguish between different dust models.
