Cosmic Alerts: GW & GRB Map
Gravitational waves and GRBs
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Gravitational waves, gamma-ray bursts, neutrinos and fast radio bursts, drawn straight from public observatory data. Measured distances get a real place in space.
Where in the sky, and how far from Earth, did it happen?
This app plots gravitational waves, gamma-ray bursts, high-energy neutrinos and fast radio bursts using the observational data that research institutions publish.
■ A 3D map that uses real distances
Earth sits at the origin. Events with a measured redshift are placed at their actual comoving distance. Turn the dial and the viewpoint travels from just outside Earth all the way to the edge of the observable universe — from looking up at the sky like a planetarium to seeing the whole universe at once, without a break.
■ All-sky map
The whole sky on one page, in galactic coordinates with the Hammer-Aitoff equal-area projection. It is the same layout as the famous all-sky figure CGRO/BATSE produced from 2,704 gamma-ray bursts, so you can read off the fact those bursts scatter isotropically instead of crowding the galactic plane.
■ Colour is photon energy
Twelve decades of energy, from µeV radio waves to PeV neutrinos, mapped to colour. Marker size is fluence — the total energy that reached us. Drag across the legend to show only the band you care about.
■ When something is unknown, it says so
Most gamma-ray bursts have no measured distance. Empirical spectral relations can give an estimate, but the same observables map to several redshifts, so the value is not determined. This app never presents an estimate as a distance. Bursts with only a known direction are drawn as rays from the origin — so the fact that most bursts have no known distance is itself visible on screen.
■ Alerts for new events
When a new event is published, the app creates a notification on your device. You can choose which event types to be told about. No push notification server is involved.
■ Data sources
• GWOSC (Gravitational Wave Open Science Center, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA)
• GraceDB (LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA low-latency alerts)
• NASA HEASARC (Fermi GBM / Swift BAT / CGRO BATSE burst catalogs)
• NASA GCN (AMON/IceCube high-energy neutrinos)
• CHIME/FRB Catalog 1 (CHIME/FRB Collaboration et al. 2021, ApJS 257, 59, CC BY 4.0)
• Star background: Yale Bright Star Catalog
All of it comes from archives those institutions publish openly.
This app is unofficial and is not endorsed by or affiliated with any of them.
■ Also
• English / 日本語 / Français / Deutsch / Español / 简体中文 / 繁體中文
• No account required
• Retrieved data is stored on your device, so the last state is readable offline
• Distances and lookback times use the Planck 2018 ΛCDM model
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Minor improvements.
The developer, AKIRA TEZUKA, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Used to Track You
The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:
- Identifiers
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Identifiers
- Usage Data
- Diagnostics
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- AKIRA TEZUKA
- Size
- 6 MB
- Category
- Education
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 18.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 18.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 18.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 15.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 2.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
English and 6 more
- English, French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Contains
Advertising
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Remove Ads $1.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 Akira Tezuka