A NASA scientist and her Alabama team have won America's top prize in high-energy astronomy for their role in detecting the first gravitational and light waves coming from the collision of two neutron stars.

Dr. Colleen Wilson-Hodge and the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Team (GBM) were chosen by the American Astronomical Society for its 2018 Bruno Rossi Prize in high-energy astrophysics. "The discovery of gamma radiation immediately following the detection of a gravitational wave from a distant galaxy will be remembered hundreds of years from now as a breakthrough observation in high-energy astrophysics," said Gerald Fishman, NASA emeritus scientist and winner of the 1994 Rossi Prize.

The discovery happened like this. At 7:41 a.m. CDT on Aug. 17, 2017, the GBM team at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville picked up a weak pulse of gamma rays. The team alerted astronomers around the world within 14 seconds. Scientists with the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a gravitational wave source two seconds before GBM's detection.

Astronomers spread the news of the joint detection and began scanning the aftermath of the explosion with telescopes capable of observing the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The result was what Science magazine called "a celestial light show" that generated three major scientific advances including "the origin of half the elements heavier than iron, including silver, gold, and platinum."

This new way of "seeing" star collisions is called "multi-messenger astrophysics," and David Burns, director of the Marshall center's Science and Technology Office. "Colleen and the GBM team are exploring the universe in fundamentally new ways," Burns said.