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.
Some words from the release:
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.
As more time is spent gathering data, this sky map will get deeper and richer, revealing (it is expected) lots of new features of our universe. The Gamma-Ray bursts they are able to observe and track are exciting too, and so there will be a lot of new science to be uncovered in that area of astrophysics too.
Much more is to be found in the release and here, including the audio of the discussion/presentation the scientists made for the public, and you can find more information about the science that Fermi will do here. images here.
-cvj
