Browse > Home / Aeronautics News / NASA Renames Observatory for Fermi, Reveals Entire Gamma-Ray Sky

NASA Renames Observatory for Fermi, Reveals Entire Gamma-Ray Sky

Written by thomas · Filed Under Aeronautics News 

August 26, 2008

thomas

WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — NASA’s newest
observatory, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, has begun
its mission of exploring the universe in high-energy gamma rays. The
spacecraft and its revolutionary instruments passed their orbital checkout
with flying colors.

NASA announced today that GLAST has been renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray
Space Telescope. The new name honors Prof. Enrico Fermi (1901 – 1954), a
pioneer in high-energy physics.

“Enrico Fermi was the first person to suggest how cosmic particles
could be accelerated to high speeds,” said Paul Hertz, chief scientist for
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “His
theory provides the foundation for understanding the new phenomena his
namesake telescope will discover.”

Scientists expect Fermi will discover many new pulsars in our own
galaxy, reveal powerful processes near supermassive black holes at the
cores of thousands of active galaxies and enable a search for signs of new
physical laws.

For two months following the spacecraft’s June 11 launch, scientists
tested and calibrated its two instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT)
and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM).

The LAT team today unveiled an all-sky image showing the glowing gas of
the Milky Way, blinking pulsars, and a flaring galaxy billions of
light-years away. The map combines 95 hours of the instrument’s “first
light” observations. A similar image, produced by NASA’s now-defunct
Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, took years of observations to produce.

The image shows gas and dust in the plane of the Milky Way glowing in
gamma rays due to collisions with accelerated nuclei called cosmic rays.
The famous Crab Nebula and Vela pulsars also shine brightly at these
wavelengths. These fast-spinning neutron stars, which form when massive
stars die, were originally discovered by their radio emissions. The image’s
third pulsar, named Geminga and located in Gemini, is not a radio source.
It was discovered by an earlier gamma-ray satellite. Fermi is expected to
discover many more radio-quiet pulsars, providing key information about how
these exotic objects work.

A fourth bright spot in the LAT image lies some 7.1 billion light-years
away, far beyond our galaxy. This is 3C 454.3 in Pegasus, a type of active
galaxy called a blazar. It’s now undergoing a flaring episode that makes it
especially bright.

The LAT scans the entire sky every three hours when operating in survey
mode, which will occupy most of the telescope’s observing time during the
first year of operations. These fast snapshots will let scientists monitor
rapidly changing sources.

The instrument detects photons with energies ranging from 20 million
electron volts to over 300 billion electron volts. The high end of this
range, which corresponds to energies more than 5 million times greater than
dental X-rays, is little explored.

The spacecraft’s secondary instrument, the GBM, spotted 31 gamma-ray
bursts in its first month of operations. These high-energy blasts occur
when massive stars die or when orbiting neutron stars spiral together and
merge.

The GBM is sensitive to less energetic gamma rays than the LAT. Bursts
seen by both instruments will provide an unprecedented look across a broad
gamma-ray spectrum, enabling scientists to peer into the processes powering
these events.

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle
physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of
Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and
partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the U.S.

For more information, images and animations on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/glast

SOURCE NASA

» Próximo Post - LAN CARGO to Begin Operations in Central America
« Post Aneterior - Boeing Awarded US Army Contract for 191 CH-47F Chinook Helicopters

Comments

¿Tiene algo que decir?

You must be logged in to post a comment.