Time Domain Astronomy with Fermi GBM in the Multi-messenger Era

As the Multi-Messenger era begins with detections of gravitational waves with LIGO and neutrinos with IceCube, the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor provides context observations of gamma-ray transients between 8 keV and 40 MeV. Fermi GBM has a wide field of view, high uptime, and both in-orbit triggering and high time resolution continuous data enabling offline searches for weaker transients. GBM detects numerous gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), soft gamma-ray repeaters, X-ray bursters, solar flares and terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. Longer timescale transients, predominantly in our galaxy so far, are detected using the Earth occultation technique and epoch-folding for periodic sources. The GBM team has developed two ground-based searches to enhance detections of faint transients, especially short GRBs. The targeted search uses the time and location of an event detected with another instrument to coherently search the GBM data, increasing the sensitivity to a transient. The untargeted search agnostically searches the GBM data for all directions and times to find weaker transients. This search finds about 80 short GRBs per year, in addition to the 40 per year triggered on-orbit. With its large field of view, high duty cycle and increasingly sophisticated detection methods, Fermi GBM is expected to have a major role in the Multi-Messenger era.