Credit: NASA
Fermi By The Book
June 11, 2024, marked the 16th anniversary of the launch of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, named in honor of the great physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi, as it's commonly called, scans the entire sky approximately every 3 hours looking for mysterious cosmic sources of high-energy gamma ray emission. These sources include black holes, neutron stars and other compact objects, stars and the Sun, bursts of gamma rays which are observed to occur every few days (most of which herald the birth of a new black hole in the Universe) and even gamma ray flashes produced by thunderstorms in earth's atmosphere. Fermi has produced many breakthrough results. Probably the two most notable are the giant Fermi Bubbles around the Milky Way, observed by Fermi's Large Area Telescope, and the detection of gamma rays from the famous neutron star merger, GW170817 = GRB 170817A, observed by Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, which, for the first time, connected electromagnetic and gravitational wave emission from a cosmic source. Fermi has accumulated beautiful, time-resolved maps of the gamma-ray sources in the entire Universe, and these data are available for anyone to view and interpret. As part of the celebration of the 15th launch anniversary, the Fermi project and NASA have published an e-book, "Our High Energy Universe: 15 Years with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope", commemorating 15 years of exciting, explosive Fermi science, downloadable as an e-book. Get your copy today!
Published: June 17, 2024
<
HEA Dictionary ● Archive
● Search HEAPOW
● Other Languages
● HEAPOW on Facebook
● Download all Images
● Education ● HEAD
>
Each week the HEASARC
brings you new, exciting and beautiful images from X-ray and Gamma ray
astronomy. Check back each week and be sure to check out the HEAPOW archive!
Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Monday, 01-Jul-2024 08:27:29 EDT