Here’s a two minute video on how NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope scanned the whole sky every day using its Large Area Telescope (LAT) between August 2008 and August 2022. The resulting 14 years of data was turned into a six minute time-lapse movie that shows the cosmos coming alive
You can watch a 14-year time-lapse of the gamma-ray sky on the NASA.gov Video YouTube channel. The video is a rectangular map of the entire gamma-ray sky, with the Milky Way galaxy at its center
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been monitoring the cosmos for gamma rays since 2008. The telescope captures the sky every three hours.
Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light. They are detected by the optical flashes they produce when interacting with the material in a specially designed instrument.
Gamma-ray astronomy allows scientists to explore exotic objects and search for new physics
Here are some telescopes that observe gamma rays:
- INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) A space telescope launched by the European Space Agency in 2002. It detects some of the most energetic radiation from space.
- Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST) Also called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), this space observatory performs gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. It has a large telescope that finds gamma rays with 10 million to more than 300 billion times the energy of visible light. It also has detectors that observe gamma-ray bursts, which are brief flashes of gamma rays.
- Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) A U.S. satellite that identifies the sources of celestial gamma rays.
- James Webb Space Telescope Can interrupt its observing plan to view new targets within 48 hours, including gamma-ray bursts.
Gamma-ray telescopes are instruments designed to detect and resolve gamma rays from sources outside Earth’s atmosphere. Gamma rays are the shortest waves (about 0.1 angstrom or less) and therefore have the highest energy in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Here are some satellites that detect gamma rays:
- Vela In the 1960s, the U.S. Vela satellites were designed to detect gamma radiation pulses from nuclear weapon tests in space. In 1967, the Vela 4A satellite made the first observation of a gamma-ray burst (GRB).
- GECAM The GECAM satellite’s main objective is to detect gamma-ray bursts.
- Explorer 11 In 1961, the American satellite Explorer 11 carried the first gamma-ray telescope.
- Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detects sudden flares of gamma rays.
Gamma-ray detectors can be categorized into two broad classes: imagers and spectrometers
Gamma rays are detected by observing the effects they have on matter. A gamma ray can collide with an electron and bounce off it like a billiard ball (Compton scatter) or it can push an electron to a higher energy level (photoelectric ionization
Watch this video on the NASA.gov Video YouTube channel.The entire gamma-ray sky is unwrapped into a rectangular map, with the center of our Milky Way galaxy located in the middle, in this 14-year time-lapse of the gamma-ray sky
The bright, steady gamma-ray glow of the Milky Way is punctuated by intense, days-long flares of near-light-speed jets powered by supermassive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies,” said Seth Digel, a senior staff scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, who created the images. “These dramatic eruptions, which can appear anywhere in the sky, occurred millions to billions of years ago, and their light is just reaching Fermi as we watch
Most of the time, the LAT detects the Sun faintly due to the impact of accelerated particles called cosmic rays – atomic nuclei traveling close to the speed of light. When they strike the Sun’s gas or even the light it emits, gamma rays result. At times, though, the Sun suddenly brightens with powerful eruptions called solar flares, which can briefly make our star one of the sky’s brightest gamma-ray sources.
The movie shows the sky in two different views. The rectangular view shows the entire sky with the center of our galaxy in the middle. This highlights the central plane of the Milky Way, which glows in gamma rays produced from cosmic rays striking interstellar gas and starlight. It’s also flecked with many other sources, including neutron stars and supernova remnants. Above and below this central band, we’re looking out of our galaxy and into the wider universe, peppered with bright, rapidly changing sources.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by Goddard. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States
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