Daily Archives: August 28, 2008

Big?

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On campus yesterday, I ran into a colleague I had not seen in a long time. She was with her daughter. She introduced us, saying, among other things, that Professor Johnson is “Big in Cosmology”.

I’ll admit that I giggled like a naughty schoolgirl for a longish, unprofessorial moment. It was sort of hard to explain, and would have derailed the conversation, so I did not try. Why was I giggling? Well, it is just that the field of cosmology (which, for the record, […] Click to continue reading this post →

GLAST, Fermi, and Early Results

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Well, the new orbiting instrument, GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope – launched June 11th this year) has passed all its tests with flying colours, apparently, and is working well. NASA has now renamed the craft the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, after Enrico Fermi. There’s a press release here.

The craft is a wonderful combination of the fields of particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, and will teach us so much about the universe (such as the nature of dark matter), and so it is exciting to hear that it all on track.

Excitingly, they’ve also released images of the early results of the observations, and you can read more about them in the press release too. Here’s a sky map made from the observations.

glast-sky_map-08_24_08

This all-sky view from GLAST reveals bright emission in the plane of the Milky Way (center), bright pulsars and super-massive black holes. Credit: NASA/DOE/International LAT Team.

Some words from the release: […] Click to continue reading this post →