Wednesday, February 15, 2012

To The Extreme… NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope Gathers In High Energy

To The Extreme… NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope Gathers In High Energy:

This all-sky Fermi view includes only sources with energies greater than 10 GeV. From some of these sources, Fermi's LAT detects only one gamma-ray photon every four months. Brighter colors indicate brighter gamma-ray sources. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

It scans the entire visible sky every three hours. Its job is to gather light – but not just any light. What’s visible to our eyes averages about 2 and 3 electron volts, but NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope is taking a deep look into a higher realm… the electromagnetic range. Here the energy doesn’t need a boost. It slams out gamma-rays with energies ranging from 20 million to more than 300 billion electron volts (GeV). After three years of space time, the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has produced its first census of these extreme energy sources. (...)
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