Gerald J. Fishman

Gerald Jay Fishman ( born February 10, 1943 in St. Louis) is an American astrophysicist known for studies of gamma -ray bursts.

Fishman studied physics at the University of Missouri in Columbia (Bachelor 1965) and Rice University in Houston with a Master 's degree in 1968 and a PhD in Space Science 1969. He was there part of a group, which was first proved gamma radiation from the Crab Nebula in balloon experiments. After graduation, he was up at the 1974 Teledyne Brown Engineering Corporation in Huntsville (Alabama ). From 1974 he was a scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center ( MSFC ) NASA, from 1977 permanently employed as a Staff Scientist. He was there the Principal Investigator for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory ( CGRO) NASA (which operated from 1991 to 2000 ) with the BATSE Detector ( Burst and Transient Source Experiment). With it succeeded in identifying the hitherto mysterious, already observed in the 1960s in the context of observation satellites for nuclear tests Gamma Ray Bursts. He is currently under Bill Paciesas a senior scientist at the Gamma Ray Burst Monitor, one of the instruments in the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, launched in 2008. As before, yet CGRO data are evaluated (2012 ).

With the isotropic distribution of the BATSE GRBs could be detected, suggesting indicated that the sources are extragalactic origin. This was directly demonstrated in 1997, when the Italian-Dutch BeppoSAX first observe an afterglow of a GRB and a little later a redshift could be determined. Fishman discovered in 1994 with the CGRO team also bursts through thunderstorms on Earth.

1982, 1991 and 1993, he received the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from NASA. In 1994 he received the Bruno Rossi Prize. In 2011 he was awarded with Enrico Costa Shaw Prize for her research on gamma -ray bursts. In 1995 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

He has been married since 1967 and has two children. He lives in Hampton Cove in Huntsville, Alabama.